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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday May 29 2018, @10:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the trillium-and-cambricon-and-cavium,-oh-my! dept.

ARM Details "Project Trillium" Machine Learning Processor Architecture

[ARM has detailed] more of the architecture of what Arm now seems to more consistently call their "machine learning processor" or MLP from here on now. The MLP IP started off a blank sheet in terms of architecture implementation and the team consists of engineers pulled off from the CPU and GPU teams.

With the MLP Arm set out to provide three key aspects that are demanded in machine learning IPs: Efficiency of convolutional computations, efficient data movement, and sufficient programmability. From a high level perspective the MLP seems no different than many other neural network accelerator IPs out there. It still has a set of MAC engines for the raw computational power, while offering some sort of programmable control flow block alongside a sufficiently robust memory subsystem.

Cambricon, Makers of Huawei's Kirin NPU IP, Build A Big AI Chip and PCIe Card

Cambricon Technologies, the company in collaboration with HiSilicon / Huawei for licensing specialist AI silicon intellectual property for the Kirin 970 smartphone chipset, have gone solo and created their own series of chips for the data center. The IP inside the Kirin 970 is known as Cambricon-1A, the company's first licensable IP. At the time, finding information on Cambricon was difficult: its website was a series of static images with Chinese embedded into the image itself. Funnily enough, we used the AI-accelerated translate feature on the Huawei Mate 10 to translate what the website said. Fast forward 12-18 months, and the Cambricon website is now interactive and has information about upcoming products. A few of which were announced recently.

Built on TSMC's 16FF, the MLU-100 is an 80W chip with a capability of 64 TFLOPS of traditional half-precision or 128 TOPS using the 8-bit integer metric commonly used in machine learning algorithms. This is at 1.0 GHz, or the 'standard' mode – Cambricon's CEO, Dr Chan Tianshi, stated that their new chip has a high-performance mode at 1.30 GHz, which allows for 83.2 TFLOPS (16-bit float) or 166.4 TOPS (8-bit int) but rises to 110W. This technically decreases performance efficiency, but allows for a faster chip. All this data relies on sparse data modes being enabled.

[...] David Schor from WikiChip (the main source of this article) states that this could be NVIDIA's first major ASIC competition for machine learning, if made available to commercial partners. To that end, Cambricon is also manufacturing a PCIe card.

Assessing Cavium's ThunderX2: The Arm Server Dream Realized At Last

A little less than 2 years ago, we investigated the first Arm server SoC that had a chance to compete with midrange Xeon E5s: the Cavium ThunderX. The SoC showed promise, however the low single-threaded performance and some power management issues relegated the 48-core SoC to more niche markets such as CDN and Web caching. In the end, Cavium's first server SoC was not a real threat to Intel's Xeon.

But Cavium did not give up, and rightfully so: the server market is more attractive than ever. Intel's datacenter group is good for about 20 Billion USD (!) in revenue per year. And even better, profit margins are in 50% range. When you want to profits and cash flow, the server market far outpaces any other hardware market. So following the launch of the ThunderX, Cavium promised to bring out a second iteration: better power management, better single thread performance and even more cores (54).


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 29 2018, @12:28PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday May 29 2018, @12:28PM (#685551) Journal

    The meaning of the Vision Fund [economist.com]

    The fund is the result of a peculiar alliance forged in 2016 between Mr Son and Muhammad bin Salman. Saudi Arabia’s thrusting crown prince handed Mr Son $45bn as part of his attempt to diversify the kingdom’s economy. That great dollop of capital attracted more investors—from Abu Dhabi, Apple and others. Add in SoftBank’s own $28bn of equity, and Mr Son has a war chest of $100bn. That far exceeds the $64bn that all venture capital (VC) funds raised globally in 2016; it is four times the size of the biggest private-equity fund ever raised (see Briefing [economist.com]). One VC grandee calls Vision Fund “the most powerful investor in our world”.

    SoftBank to sell Flipkart stake to Walmart, first known Vision Fund divestment [reuters.com]

    SoftBank did not disclose terms of the sale but this month CEO Masayoshi Son said its investment in the Indian firm was worth around $4 billion. The Vision Fund invested $2.5 billion in Flipkart in August last year.

    SoftBank Is Japan’s HNA. That’s Good [bloomberg.com]

    If SoftBank were classed as an investment holding company, its $130 billion of interest-bearing debt would be judged against the market value of its portfolio. The firm’s listed holdings alone are worth more than $160 billion. To that we can add $80 billion of stakes purchased over the past three years in companies from Uber Technologies Inc. to ARM Holdings Plc; those are probably worth considerably more now.

    One $100 Billion Tech Fund Isn’t Enough for SoftBank CEO: The launch of Vision Fund II is ‘just a matter of time,’ says Masayoshi Son [wsj.com]

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