Processor News from Arm, Ampere and Tachyum

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting - semiconductor edition:

• Arm launches Trillium to bring ML to edge devices.  Arm announced Project Trillium, a suite of Arm intellectual property including new highly scalable processors that will deliver enhanced machine learning (ML) and neural network functionality. With a focus on scalability Trillium will cover mobile processors and Arm ML products for sensors, mobile, entertainment and beyond. Built from the ground-up for ML, the Arm ML processor delivers 4.6 trillion operations per second and over three trillion operations per second per watt (TOPs/W). THe Arm OD processor is designed to efficiently identify people and other objects with virtually unlimited objects per frame. Arm NN software is optimized for neural networks, and bridges the gap between NN frameworks such as TensorFlow, Caffe, and Android NN and the full range of Arm Cortex CPUs, Arm Mali GPUs, and ML processors. 

• Chip Startup Ampere Launches. Silicon Valley chip startup Ampere emerged from stealth last week, led by former Intel president Renee James. As the company states, its chips born in and built for the cloud with a modern architecture, featuring 64-bit Arm server processors geared for high memory performance and substantially lower power and total cost of ownership. "We have an opportunity with cloud computing to take a fresh approach with products that are built to address the new software ecosystem,” said James. “The workloads moving to the cloud require more memory, and at the same time, customers have stringent requirements for power, size and costs. The software that runs the cloud enables Ampere to design with a different point of view. The Ampere team’s approach and architecture meets the expectation on performance and power and gives customers the freedom to accelerate the delivery of the most memory-intensive applications and workloads such as AI, big data, storage and database in their next-generation data centers." 

• Tachyum nets investment from IPM.  After emerging from stealth last year chip company Tachyum announced it has received an outside investment from IPM Growth, the venture capital division of InfraPartners Management. Tachyum looks to deliver a product family of "Cloud Chips" that offer "unprecedented power savings, performance and value to help overcome the energy demands of exponential growth in data center capacity." Tachyum CEO Dr. Radoslav Danilak holds over 100 granted patents, and notes that the investment from IPN gives the company a "significant boost in our ability to bring our Cloud Chip to life and to address the sea change in semiconductor development threatening to topple industries that depend on processing performance and density."