Nick Ni, Director of Product Marketing at Xilinx, presents the “Xilinx AI Engine: High Performance with Future-proof Architecture Adaptability” tutorial at the May 2019 Embedded Vision Summit.
AI inference demands orders- of-magnitude more compute capacity than what today’s SoCs offer. At the same time, neural network topologies are changing too quickly to be addressed by ASICs that take years to go from architecture to production. In this talk, Ni introduces the Xilinx AI Engine, which complements the dynamically- programmable FPGA fabric to enable ASIC-like performance via custom data flows and a flexible memory hierarchy. This combination provides an orders-of-magnitude boost in AI performance along with the hardware architecture flexibility needed to quickly adapt to rapidly evolving neural network topologies.