SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 27, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- As traditional
chip makers struggle to embrace the challenges presented by the
rapidly evolving AI software landscape, a San Jose startup has announced it has working
silicon and a whole new future-proof chip paradigm to address these
issues.
The SimpleMachines, Inc. (SMI) team – which includes leading
research scientists and industry heavyweights formerly of Qualcomm,
Intel and Sun Microsystems – has created a first-of-its-kind easily
programmable, high-performance chip that will accelerate a wide
variety of AI and machine-learning applications. The chip, Mozart,
is a TSMC 16-nanometer design that utilizes HBM2 memory and is
sampling as a standard PCIe card. Initial results have shown
significant speedups across a broad set of AI applications, unlike
other specialized AI chips. Examples include recommendation
engines, speech and language processing, and image detection, all
of which can run simultaneously.
Mozart is the result of 10 years of research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that included
several high-profile papers and awards. The research was led by
SMI's Founder, CEO and CTO Karu Sankaralingam, also a computer
science professor at UW.
The working chip demonstrates that a clean-slate design can
deliver the performance of custom-built single purpose processors
while maintaining flexibility and programmability. The chip's
software interface includes direct TensorFlow support as well as
API's for C/C++ and Python. Future generations of the chip
will leverage its unique architecture to scale up and down the
power spectrum from enterprise-class high-performance systems to
5-watt IoT devices.
Mozart will be available via a PCIe card called Accelerando, or
via the Symphony Cloud Service (SMI's hosted cloud service with
easy access to public clouds like Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and
AWS).
"Mozart is an extremely complex chip, one of the few using HBM2
(high-bandwidth memory) for this type of application,"
Sankaralingam said. "It took our silicon team under a week from
having the chip in-house to running applications on the device,
putting us on the fast track to take our first silicon (AO) to
production."
Unlike many of the new chips that have been designed for single
workloads like image processing, Mozart's strength is in its
ability to adapt on the fly and accelerate a wide variety of
workloads across a diverse range of industries and applications,
including image detection, image classification, natural
language processing, language translation, network security,
recommendation engines, graph processing, drug discovery, and gene
sequence alignment.
"The chip's design can support very large models today and is
capable of running up to 64 different models simultaneously," said
Greg Wright, SMI's Chief Architect.
"Our next-generation 7-nanometer design is expected to be ready to
sample by the end of 2021 and will be 20x faster on a diverse set
of workloads than current chips."
Mozart's architecture leverages the concept of Composable
Computing, which abstracts any software application into a small
number of defined behaviors. SMI's novel compiler integrates into
the backend of standard AI frameworks like TensorFlow to translate
those programs and reconfigures the hardware on the fly to result
in a chip that behaves as if it were originally designed for that
application.
"SimpleMachines' solution is a radically new software-centric
approach that deploys a programmable platform with a breakthrough
software stack and compiler that enables the programmer to easily
optimize the hardware on the fly and get the performance of custom
silicon with a platform that supports hundreds of different use
cases," Wright said.
SMI is initially targeting companies in the public datacenter,
network security, finance, and insurance industries for its Mozart
Platform with plans to disrupt the edge and mobile device markets
in future product generations. According to Allied Market
Research, the global AI chip market will reach $91 billion by 2025, with growth rates of 45% a
year until then. Market drivers include a surge in demand for smart
homes and smart cities, more investment in AI startups, and the
rise of smart robots.
"As fast, flexible computing becomes more accessible, AI will be
used by more industries for more applications more frequently, so
chip design must evolve accordingly," Sankaralingam said. "We
are disrupting the next wave of computing with our breakthrough
technology and are excited about the market opportunity, especially
for AI chips along the power spectrum."
About SimpleMachines, Inc.
Founded in 2017, SimpleMachines, Inc. (SMI) is an AI-focused
semiconductor startup that is disrupting the next wave of
computing. The company's flagship technology, Mozart Platform, is a
first-of-its-kind, easily programmable high-performance silicon
chip that can run on various classes of AI algorithms. SMI's
first-generation chip - available via a PCIe card called
Accelerando, or Symphony Cloud Service - is designed to provide
high performance execution of software being developed for AI,
machine learning, and big data analytics. The product roadmap
includes a second and third generation chip design that will target
the large and rapidly growing mobile and edge computing markets.
For more information, please visit
https://www.simplemachines.ai/.
Contact:
Neal
Leavitt
Leavitt Communications
neal@leavcom.com
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SOURCE SimpleMachines