Re:Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices
by blackguardx on Friday May 26, 2017 @05:55PM
(#14427490)
FPGAs are pretty bad space-wise and power-wise compared to straight up ASICs. Apple could make some blocks highly configurable, but even an FPGA designer wouldn't use FPGA fabric to do multiplication if they cared about performance. FPGAs are a mix of general purpose logic blocks (the fabric) and dedicated blocks like multipliers, dividers, PLLs, memory, serializers and deserializers, etc.
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Re:Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices
by highd on Friday May 26, 2017 @06:31PM
(#14427672)
That's what I'm thinking - some sort of configurable FPGA like fabric around a bulk of TPUv1 style cores, maybe for routing outputs around so you can do some nice pipe-lining like you might want with CV on video.