Axelera unveils AI acceleration platform

Eindhoven-based Axelera AI has announced its Metis artificial-intelligence platform to accelerate computer vision processing at the edge. It encompasses the Metis AI processing unit (AIPU) chip and the Voyager SDK software stack. PCI Express and M.2 acceleration cards will be available for selected customers in early 2023. Separately, Axelera is working with partners to develop system-ready vision solutions.

The Metis AIPU is a quad-core architecture. Central to the operation of each core is Axelera’s SRAM-based Digital In-Memory Computing (D-IMC) engine for accelerating matrix-vector multiplication operations, offering a high energy efficiency of 15 tera operations per second (TOPS) per watt at INT8 precision. The Thetis test chip, taped out a year ago, already demonstrated the engine’s efficacy. FP32 iso-accuracy is achieved without the need to retrain the neural network models.

Each AIPU core can execute all layers of a standard neural network without external interactions delivering up to 53.5 TOPS. Thus, the compound throughput of the AIPU can reach 214 TOPS. The cores can either be combined to boost the throughput of a complex workload, operate independently on the same neural network to reduce latency or concurrently process different neural networks for applications featuring pipelines of neural networks.