5 ms·
That's a verbose way to say 1mW, and I wouldn't have guessed from the title that the chip is being trained to play Doom, rather than running the game at that po
by tiedieconderoga 4y ago
That's a verbose way to say 1mW, and I wouldn't have guessed from the title that the chip is being trained to play Doom, rather than running the game at that power level.
Thing is, Watts don't have a time dimension. It sounds like this is how much power was being consumed by the chip while it ran the model to play the game in realtime, but it also sounds like they were using the chip to train the model. From the linked IEEE Spectrum article:
>"After its first kill, it unloads the clip, but then it figures out that’s not a good strategy,” ...
It sounds cool, but some more details would be nice. This chip seems to use a custom Tensilica core like the ESP8266/32 family started with, but we'll also have ARM Cortex-M CPUs with neural accelerators soon, so this space will be interesting to watch.
- mock-possum 4y agoYeah, the title is really misleading - > Syntiant trained the NDP200's neural network using VizDoom, a version of Doom used for AI research and reinforcement learning from raw visual information. Training required understanding what the neural network was seeing, primarily identifying the enemy and ultimately defining a response. In this case, see demon, shoot demon. The "player" is tasked with defending a circular room that is under constant attack. > The purpose of the demo is not to show how well it can play Doom, but to demonstrate how efficient the NDP200 is at "bounding-box person detection" So like... it's playing a DOOM mod that teaches it to turn in circles and aim and shoot when it sees an enemy - until it runs out of ammo and it dies because it's standing still and the enemies walk up and kill it. It's not that that's not an accomplishment, it's more that that's not really 'playing DOOM' as far as anyone who's ever played DOOM would understand it. You know?
- jeeeb 4y ago> The purpose of the demo is not to show how well it can play Doom, but to demonstrate how efficient the NDP200 is at "bounding-box person detection" Personally this part seemed like a tall claim to me as well. Bounding box detection in the environment shown would be incredibly easy. There is no visual complexity at all. Just detecting patches of a certain colour would do the job.
- mmoskal 4y agoIt looks like the Tensillica is only DSP. The control core is M0. 1mW is quite low though - typical M0 running at full speed would typically be 10-100mW and they have the neural unit on as well.
- kazinator 4y agoWatts have a time dimension: W = J/s (Joule of energy per second) measuring power/intensity.
- rzzzt 4y agoIt is a great philosophical question, though. Speed is derived from the distance traveled per unit of time, but does speed itself have a time dimension? ...perhaps if it changes over time, but that's acceleration and so on.
- kazinator 4y agoOne of the degrees of freedom in speed is time. We can hold the distance constant and obtain different speeds by varying time.
- rzzzt 4y agoTrue, but if you pick just one (constant) speed/power value, like the 1 mW in the article, only the distance/work varies as a function of time.
- unlikelymordant 4y agoIn this case i assume Watts = Volts*Amps, if volts is 5v, then its easy enough to calculate the continuous current draw of the chip.
- detourdog 4y agoisn’t the change over time amps? or volts for that matter.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rzzzt 4y agoIt is the very definition of a milliwatt.
- tgv 4y agoI guess the issue is that it could be running for a million years to complete training, all the while "only" consuming 1mW.
- rzzzt 4y agoPower should still be an indication of the overall energy spent provided it was used up somewhat evenly. "Neural Chip Plays Doom for 2 Hours Using 7.2 J of Energy" is quite a mouthful.
- low_tech_love 4y agoPlus, that’s not really Doom.
- djmips 4y agoIt's not even running Doom? It looks like a single arena like room with a few enemies from Doom and you are able to shoot... Not really playing Doom.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoAhhhg! "it unloads the magazine"
- xg15 4y ago> I wouldn't have guessed from the title that the chip is being trained to play Doom, rather than running the game at that power level. The illustration and the opening paragraph, which is all about devices that run Doom, not "play" it, isn't helping either.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoIn the article it says, explicitly, that what it is doing is doing bounded box person detection