Sector News

At this week’s Intel HPC Developer Conference in Denver, Colrado, USA this week, Raja Koduri,  senior vice president, chief architect, and general manager of architecture, graphics and software at Intel (pictured), introduced a new category of discrete general-purpose GPUs optimised for artificial intelligence (AI) and high performance computing (HPC) convergence.

The Ponte Vecchio general purpose GPU is based on the Xe architecture.

“HPC and AI workloads demand diverse architectures, ranging from CPUs, general-purpose GPUs and FPGAs, to more specialised deep-learning neural network processors (NNPs), which Intel demonstrated earlier this month,” said Koduri.

Ponte Vecchio is architected for HPC modeling and simulation workloads and AI training. It will be manufactured on Intel’s 7nm technology and will be Intel’s first Xe-based GPU optimised for HPC and AI workloads. Ponte Vecchio will leverage Intel’s Foveros 3D and EMIB packaging and feature high-bandwidth memory, Compute Express Link interconnect and other IP in one package.

Intel also launched the oneAPI initiative to define programming for an AI-infused, multi-architecture world. oneAPI delivers a unified and open programming experience to developers on the architecture of their choice without compromising performance and eliminating the complexity of separate code bases, multiple-programming languages, and different tools and workflows. It preserves existing software investments with support for existing languages while delivering flexibility for developers to create versatile applications.

The oneAPI specification includes a direct programming language, powerful application programming interfaces (APIs) and a low-level hardware interface. Intel’s oneAPI beta software provides developers a comprehensive portfolio of developer tools that include compilers, libraries and analysers, packaged into domain-focused toolkits. The initial oneAPI beta release targets Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Core processors with integrated graphics and Intel FPGAs, with additional hardware support to follow in future releases.

Developers can download the oneAPI tools, test drive them in the Intel oneAPI DevCloud.

http://www.intel.com

To support the demand for more smart applications for AI embedded system and application developers, Aetina offers a series of system on modules (SoMs) built with Nvidia Jetson modules. The company has compared its Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier edge computing platform with the RTX 2080 graphics card. Using the Aetina Jetson AGX Xavier AI computing platform, which has 512 CUDA computing cores and 11 TFLOPS of AI computing inference, the company compared the Nvidia RTX 2080 high-performance graphics card which provides 20.14TFLOPS computing performance, but it needs 225W for operation. However, with the Xavier platform, it only cost 30W for operation, bringing 0.367 TFLOPS/W, for a four-fold improvement in AI performance effciency, reports Aetina, compared to RTX 2080’s 0.09 TFLOPS/W. The Xavier platform supports various I/O extension, external high-speed Net card, and flexible match with different camera modules. As an SoM platform, the Aetina Xavier platform is easy to deploy at any edge position in the embedded IoT environment, lower the AI latency, and bring a perfect AIoT (AI of things) chain at the edge.

Using the software, the Aetina R&D team optimised the Openpose algorithm, to detect human skeletons and capture several people in real-time. With the data from the skeleton, it can define the pose with action, execute a higher-level application.

With Aetina Jetson AGX Xavier edge AI computing platform, high-performance with low power consumption can realise an AI application of collapse detection in the intelligent medical sector and also conduct customer behaviour analysis in smart retail applications.

Aetina was founded in Taiwan in 2012, as a support provider of high-performance GPGPU and Jetson edge AI computing solutions for embedded applications. The company focuses on the industrial market, providing industrial components and longevity of service.

http://www.aetina.com