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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 06 2017, @05:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the neural-network-in-my-toaster dept.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11804/huawei-shows-unannounced-kirin-970-at-ifa-2017-dedicated-neural-processing-unit

The headline that Huawei seems to want to promote is the addition of dedicated neural network silicon inside the Kirin 970, dubbed the Neural Processing Unit (NPU). The sticker performance of the NPU is rated at 1.92 TFLOPs of FP16, which for reference, is about 3x what the Kirin 960's GPU alone can do on paper (~0.6 TFLOPs FP16). Or to put this in practical terms, Huawei says that the NPU is capable of discerning 2005 images per minute from internal testing, compared to 97 images per minute without the NPU – and presumably on the CPU – using the Kirin Thundersoft software (likely a future brand name). Obviously, depending on the implementation and power use, I would expect Huawei to try and leverage the NPU as much as possible in upcoming designs.

Other details for the Kirin 970 show improvements over the Kirin 960. First is the movement to TSMC's 10nm process, from 16FF+. The Kirin 960 launched a few months before the 10nm ramp up for other high-end smartphone SoCs hit the shelves, so Huawei is matching their competitors here. The core configuration is the same as the 960, with four ARM Cortex A73 cores and four ARM Cortex A53 cores, this time clocked at 2.4 GHz and 1.8 GHz respectively. The integrated graphics is the newest Mali G72, announced alongside the A75/A55 processors earlier this year, which will be in an MP12 configuration. Frequency was not listed.

[...] Huawei's final declarations on the NPU state that it is 25x the performance of a CPU with 50x the energy efficiency, and using a new HiAI (Hi-Silicon AI) nomenclature.

I'm waiting for the smartphone that packs in a central processing unit, graphics processing unit, neural processing unit, and quantum processing unit.

Related: Snapdragon 820 SoC's Zeroth Neuromorphic Chip to Block Malware on Smartphones
Intel Announces Movidius Myriad X Vision Processing Unit


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @06:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @06:41PM (#564220)

    Too bad you won't be able to do any of those neat things unless you both work for a giant corporation and manage to convince a hierarchy of bean-counters to let you do it.