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Deep neural-network accelerator (DNA) AI processor

The Tensilica DNA 100 processor is an easily scalable processor comprising of specialized hardware engines and a tightly coupled Tensilica DSP. Deep neural networks are constituted of inherent sparsity (presence of zeros) in both weights and activations. The DNA 100 processor’s specialized hardware engines eliminate both loading and storing of zeros and applying compute on them, allowing this sparsity to be leveraged for power efficiency, bandwidth, and compute reduction. Retraining of neural networks can further increase the sparsity in the networks and achieve maximum performance from the DNA 100 processor’s sparse compute engine. This enables the DNA 100 to leverage sparsity for performance boost (through compute reduction), enhanced power efficiency and bandwidth reduction. Retraining of neural networks can further increase the sparsity in the networks and achieve maximum performance from the DNA 100 processor’s sparse compute engine. As a result, the DNA 100 processor delivers both high performance and power efficiency across a full range of compute from 0.5 TeraMAC (TMAC) to 100s of TMACs.

特色

Specialized design to take advantage of sparsity in weights and activations for compute and bandwidth reduction
Industry-leading performance and power efficiency

Up to 4.7X performance for similar array sizes
Up to 2.3X power efficiency for similar array sizes

Wide and configurable AXI bus width to sustain various ranges of neural network tasks
Generic AI processor that runs all neural network layers
Architected to serve wide range of compute requirements

Single DNA 100 processor scales from 0.5 to 12 effective 8b TMACs
Multiple DNA 100 processors can be stacked to achieve 100s of TMACs

Programmable and extensible

Flexible and future proof

Complete AI software platform

Tensilica Neural Network Compiler for offline automated code generation
Android Neural Network API (ANN) support for dynamic automated network deployment