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Second version of HoloLens HPU will incorporate AI coprocessor
- dsr_ 9y agoIs it time to recognize that "AI" is the meaningless buzzword of 2017? "Nothing is cooler because it is cyber." -- J.D. Falk, RIP.
- yread 9y ago"AI" might be, "AI ASIC" is pretty cool though!
- nsxwolf 9y agoNext they'll add AI to the Juicebro.
- deelowe 9y agoHow is AI meaningless? I mean, I guess the term can be seen as silly, but I mentally map it to "statistical computing." [edit] Since I'm getting down votes, can someone clarify? I wasn't being contrarian with the above comment. Is my mental map of what AI means as an industry term incorrect?
- yequalsx 9y agoAny term/phrase can be rendered meaningless by overuse and misuse. The person you are responding to isn't claiming AI, as it actually is and what it actually means, is meaningless. They are claiming that "AI" the phrase is becoming meaningless.
- deelowe 9y agoUnderstood and my point was that anytime I see AI used in articles these days, they seem to be referring to statistical computing solutions. I know AI can also refer to rule based algorithms, but I rarely see it applied in those contexts these days. Put another way, does anyone read the above statement and think "MS is developing a chip to accelerate A*?"
- sp332 9y agoAI doesn't have to be statistical. It can be rule-based, for example. The reason it's useless is that knowing your headset has "AI" in it doesn't tell you anything about its functionality.
- ktta 9y ago'AI' is often a delicate term (in the sense the real meaning is often hotly debated). It represents what many people worked decades of their lives for, but it is still really as hard and as abstract since the idea was first conceived. Using the term might get points for marketing, but you'll only get contempt from the people who realize what it really stands for.
- donpdonp 9y agoI think you've hit it on the head. 'AI' computations are a variety of mathematical and statistical techniques, which on their own are varied and interesting but it doesnt suggest a fundamental difference in hardware over general purpose computing. GPUs provide distinct advatages for some kinds of operations, but its not well defined that "AI" has its own set of computations for which hardware can be custom built for, and be distinguishable from existing kinds of CPU hardware.
- bitL 9y ago"Statistical computing" is kinda outdated and stems from misunderstanding what ML is and the past reliance on some well-known statistical methods. Look at it as a parallelizable non-linear optimization able to reduce dimensionality by employing cool tricks and surprisingly efficient in some real-world tasks. If you just take a general, fully-connected DNN, it wouldn't work at all; those tricks like CNN/RNN/LSTM/GAN make it all work within a narrow setup of hyperparameters.
- lend000 9y agoAn "AI" coprocessor could be an FPGA, a neuromorphic chip, a DSP, a TPU, or a GPU -- it's incredibly vague.
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoYour definition feels pretty reasonable, but I think the issue is that the term "AI" is being slapped on tons of services that do extremely basic predictions. If it has a formula in it, it's now "AI".
- jorgemf 9y agoAI uses more than statistics. Some algorithms doesn't use statistics at all, for example you can build decision trees using information theory instead of statistics. Statistics is a big part of AI, but in most algorithms you will find more than just statistics like optimization, algebra, ...
- EddieSpeaks 9y agoAI isn't a buzzword, it's been around since 1937 - it's a collective term for all learning algorithms, in this case on-chip DNN
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoAI has been a word since McCarthy coined it in 1955. It is always "just around the corner", but it is hardly a meaningless buzzword.
- freehunter 9y agoThe problem is people keep moving the goalposts. As soon as some AI technique is shown, suddenly it's just an algorithm and not actually AI. AI is something else. And then we invent that, and suddenly it's just an algorithm, not AI. AI is magic. As soon as you know how the trick is done, it's just a trick. It's not magic anymore. There can never be such thing as AI, because as soon as it's put into a computer, it's just an algorithm. Computers are constantly doing things that only humans could have done just a few years prior, but it's never AI. It's just algorithms.
- ramshanker 9y agoI remember HoloLens being announced to be available in "windows 10 timeframe". Still awaiting (EDIT:) Cheaper consumer version.
- eightysixfour 9y agoIt has been available for more than a year.
- wlesieutre 9y agoIf Windows 10 is the "forever" version of Windows with continuous upgrades then they've got plenty of time!
- esterly 9y agoHoloLen hardware can be purchased here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy
- MichaelGG 9y agoHardly the device for my kids to play Minecraft on like MS hyped. Starting to feel like another Kinect - the preview movie was amazing, the actually shipped one, meh.
- eightysixfour 9y agoWasn't it introduced at build, the developer conference? I imagine that should have given a good indicator as to their initial target market while use cases are built up for production versions. The Mixed Reality headsets seem to be in the same vain, an opportunity to start introducing that tech to developers at a lower price point.
- connorcpu 9y agoThey're not really focused on making a consumer version, they're trying to turn it into an enterprise product first
- akvadrako 9y agoAny idea who makes it? It's probably close in architecture to GPUs, the kind of thing Nvidia and AMD are positioned to capitalise on.
- arcanus 9y agoI suspect it will have more in common with mobile GPUs than the big iron ASICs that come from NVIDIA or AMD.
- neurotech1 9y agoIMHO Its most likely a variant of the AMD GPU or APU, because it would take some major differentiation before nVidia would do a largely custom core processor, even for Microsoft. nVidia's Tegra Xavier SoC is under development, with the Volta GPU architecture that would include the Tensor core which is specifically intended for deep learning and AI applications.
- Symmetry 9y agoThat's doubltful. AMD is happy to provide bespoke chips for big customers (like the XBox) but what you want for inference is to multiply entire int8 matrixies in hardware dataflow. The silicon providing float32 support in an AMD GPU isn't needed and their dataflows only extend to vectors rather than matrices. In the case where the matrix you're multiplying is much bigger than the execution hardware you can throw at it this doesn't make a big difference in efficiently using adders. But using vectors rather than matrices is hugely wasteful of register read ports if you're always doing matrix operations and don't also have to excel at operations which are only vectors.
- cr0sh 9y agoMaybe: http://www.general-vision.com/ http://www.general-vision.com/ ??? No idea, actually - but they are one of a handful of companies selling such a part.
- zebrafish 9y agoI was thinking it might be closer in spirit to AMD's APU which combines graphics and compute onto the same chip.
- ratbr 9y agoSerious question: what is an AI coprocessor technically? Some machine learnt models burned on a chip? Or some kind of a neural net with updatable weights?
- arcanus 9y agoIt is not well documented by anyone. However, the expectation is that it is a matrix or convolution coprocessor, as this is a common operation in deep neural networks (for both inference and training). For instance, NVIDIA says they are supporting 4x4 convolutions with the tensor unit.
- dgacmu 9y agoOne example is: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.04760 https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.04760 There are many potential designs for these things, but the first gen TPU is one that works, is in production, and has been described in a paper. But you have to differentiate if you mean an inference engine, or something that can also do training. For HoloLens, it's probably going to be an inference unit, which means it'll possibly look something like a TPU, perhaps with more specific hardware support optimized for convolutions (which are very important for visual processing DNNs these days), as the NVidia tensor units are.
- Eridrus 9y agoProbably also enough high speed memory to store the weights without needing to go to RAM.
- chriskanan 9y agoI was in the audience at CVPR when it was presented. They were doing semantic segmentation using resnet-18, so I'm guessing it speeds up convolutions and some linear algebra during inference. I'm guessing it won't be used for training.
- danmaz74 9y agoThe AI coprocessor is probably the first processor designed directly by the marketing department...
- zitterbewegung 9y agoI used a Hololens and it was awesome (it fit over my glasses). Inference on Hololens could make you do so much more. Maybe you could use it to take scans of parts from a CNC or the CNC tool and create a system that could tell you if a similar piece will fail in the future. From what I have seen compared to Google Glass I think it could be possible for richer interactions and also it uses both eyes. But, I haven't heard any Enterprise users use Hololens.
- Pigo 9y agoWe got a couple at my company and I've built some protoypes for it, and threw up a little blog for it. The cool thing is the HoloToolkit which seems to be maintained by some xbox developers, and scripts all the functionality you need to get off the ground. The hard part has been coming up with prototypes that go beyond a cool experience, and solve some customer's problem. It doesn't recognize what it's looking at, as much as it's just recognizing the shape of what it's looking at. You have to write the functionality to then determine what it is. Though the HoloToolkit does have scripts that will recognize walls, floors, tables. But it falls really short of the wild ideas my co-workers come up with. There are some example projects out there that will show you how to determine faces, which is cool. But the best ideas most people have, the beta Skype app already knocks it out of the park.
- aantix 9y agoWhat is it about the beta Skype app that is so compelling?
- zitterbewegung 9y agoHere is my explanation: The Skype call will use the forward facing camera of the Hololens user. For the Hololens user the view of who you are calling will be presented in front of you as you move around. Also, people on the Skype call can interact and draw on objects in front of you. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/apps/skype https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/apps/skype.
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- tux1968 9y agoThe article mentions a demonstration of hand segmentation made at a conference, here's a short video of it: https://mspoweruser.com/microsofts-next-version-hololens-will-feature-new-hpu-ai-coprocessor/ https://mspoweruser.com/microsofts-next-version-hololens-wil...
- 0xffff2 9y agoSide note in case anyone at MS happens to read this, but the only actual content on this page that appears above the fold for me (viewing on a Surface Pro 4) is the headline, which is pushed nearly to the bottom of my display by all the headers/nav/whitespace. This strikes me as remarkably bad design.
- freehunter 9y agoI don't know if it's designed to do that or not, but that's been a huge trend for a few years now. I still have people request that I design a site like that, where the only thing visible by default on the homepage is a 68pt logo and on specific pages is a 68pt title. A navbar at the top and a navbar under the logo are also requested, both navbars displaying the same options. I don't get it either.
- 0xbear 9y agoI hope it also contains a decent CPU. The first version has a ridiculously underpowered Atom with no vector capability of any kind. Not the kind of thing you would expect in a $3000 device.
- clmckinley 9y agoI agree that you would expect more from a $3000 computer, but that is not what hololens is. Considering all of novel sensors and capabilities with the hololens, it is pretty amazing to me that the hololens is only $3000.
- 0xbear 9y agoHave you actually used it? I have it on my desk. It's garbage. Low res, narrow FoV display, graphics capabilities from 10 years ago. I wouldn't pay fifty bucks for it if I was spending my own money.
- dlp211 9y agoI have used one and everything you said is valid. It is fairly low res and the graphics are mobile quality, but that isn't what you are paying for, and calling it garbage is pretty unfair. Show me another device that is doing AR right now at the fidelity levels of HL. Your criticism is the equivalent of comparing an iPhone with a full on desktop workstation. They are not trying to solve the same problem and therefore do not need to have the same visual fidelity. That said, IMO, it really is prototype hardware with the intention to iterate on it until it finds a market segment. I doubt MSFT is making any money on the device. Disclaimer: Work at MSFT, have nothing to do with HL.
- rocky1138 9y ago> They are not trying to solve the same problem and therefore do not need to have the same visual fidelity. I think they are trying to solve the same problem. I'd love a desktop AR headset. They do need the same visual fidelity, we're just not there yet. I'm patient :)
- mtgx 9y agoBut will it be anymore practical to use than the first version?
- markingram 9y agoFor people who understand neural networks, this is HUGE! I have been dreaming for a custom chip for neural networks for 5 years! If they pull it off and deliver a product launch in a year or two, then they would smoke the competition again.
- Symmetry 9y agoGoogle has had their TPU out for a while now. And the next generation of NVidia GPU is supposed to have neural network accelerating hardware.
- markingram 9y agoBut they don't have HoloLens ;)
- make3 9y agoAre you kidding me. This is basically a marketing name for an 8bit gpu
- tanilama 9y agoYou mean a matrix multiplication processor?
- ori_b 9y agoYou mean headless GPU? (Or, in some cases, DSP?)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ericfrederich 9y agoI went to a Microsoft store in the mall and they are showing off Oculus Rift. They've been showing off HoloLens for a couple years now haven't they?... still can't buy it?
- lstamour 9y agoYou can buy it. You just have to bring your own software: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy