Tensilica at CES: Hololens Will Be There, Will You?

It's a new year soon. And that means New Year Resolutions. I will go to the gym...and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Microsoft Hololens

You might have seen something about the Microsoft Hololens, which was announced at Hot Chips earlier this year. The virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) headset is built in 28nm and it contains 24 customized Tensilica processors. The coprocessor, called the HPU, contains about 65 million logic gates, 8MB of SRAM, and a layer of 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM, all in a 12mm square BGA package. Its throughput is over a triillion pixel-operations per second. The HPU draws less than 10W and takes advantage of Tensilica's instruction extensions (TIE) to add 300 custom instructions to the DSPs in order to speed up specific operations needed by the HoloLens to render real-time augmented reality. Nick Baker, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, said during the Hot Chips presentation:

If you can't add custom instructions, the math density that you wind up with is not what you need. The chip uses a mixture of standalone accelerators and ones tightly coupled to its DSPs, getting an over 200X speedup over a software-only version.

Do you want to try it out? Then come along to the Cadence booth at CES in Vegas. We are in South Hall 2, ground floor, Meeting Place suite MP25677. See the end of this post for how to sign up for a meeting.

Audio

If virtual reality isn't your thing, then how about some audio? One of the most interesting audio products of the last year is the Amazon Echo, which listens to you and is ready to answer all your questions. Depending on which model you have, it is either a tall cylinder or a hockey puck. Of course, the reason I'm telling you this is that there is a Tensilica DSP in there.

The processor is an important part of any implementation, but software is an equal partner. There are typically two levels of software, one the codecs for video or audio that are fairly intimately connected to the processor itself, and then higher level application software intended for use by video or audio experts who probably have little to no knowledge of embedded processors. In audio, the almost de facto standard is Tensilica's HiFi DSP.

Also, automotive semiconductor is a hot topic. There will be a demo of Arkamys Soundstage automotive software running on a Dirana 3 HIFi2 development board from NXP, where you can control the effects and listen to the different ambiences. Plus you can go outside the exhibit hall to a real van and listen to it there, running on the original built-in speakers that the vehicle came with.

At CES, you can see brand-name products incorporating this technology, most of which I'm not allowed to simply list here. Smart phones from top manufacturers, smart watches, headphones, and more.

Vision

Tensilica also has a family of vision processors used for both vision processing and for convolutional neural net vision recognition systems. Three things we will be showing are:

AlexNet CNN recognition software running at 5-10X the performance of a GPU-based implementation:

Stereo recognition using Uurmi's software, adding depth to scenes for automotive, gesture recognition, and more:

Adding zoom, enhanced recognition in low-light situations, and more, using Almalence's Super Zoom solution:

Summary: Tensilica Everywhere

Hololens, Alexa, and more are just the pinnacles of the Tensilica world. 17 of the top 20 semiconductor companies use Tensilica. 240 licensees ship over 4B Tensilica cores per year. Book a meeting by filling out this form. Once again, we are in South Hall 2, ground floor, Meeting Place suite MP25677.

Next: IEDM: 7nm from TSMC and IBM/GLOBALFOUNDRIES/Samsung

Previous: Can Computers Think? Or Understand Chinese?