News Coverage

(January 11, 2024) SemiEngineering - “Designers at all stages of product development need to pay even greater attention to what their co-workers wrestle with, both upstream and downstream. An engineer needs to be aware that specifications, algorithms, and interfaces may need to change as precursor or follow-on groups progress though their design processes.”

(January 11, 2024) SemiEngineering - At Quadric, we’d advise that just as doomsday predictions about transformers were too hyperbolic, so too are predictions about the imminent demise of transformer architectures. But make no mistake, the bright minds of data science are hard at work today inventing the Next New Thing that will certainly capture the world’s attention in 2024 or 2025 or 2026 and might one day indeed supplant today’s state of the art.

(December 14, 2023) Semiconductor Engineering - There is a straight-forward, low-investment method for an IP evaluator to short-circuit all the vendor shenanigans and get a solid apples-to-apples result: Build Your Own Benchmarks. BYOB!...Many IP vendors may have laboriously hand-tuned, hand-pruned and twisted a reference benchmark beyond recognition in order to win the benchmark game.

(October 12, 2023) Semiconductor Engineering - A transformer structure is far more complicated, and attempts to partition on a heterogeneous multi-core architecture will result in dozens of round trips of moving data between the separate memory subsystems of each of the multiple processing engines. “Each of those shufflings of data burns power and kills throughput while accomplishing zero real work,” Steve Roddy said. “Attempting to partition and map a new, complex LLM or ViT model onto a heterogeneous architecture is orders of magnitude more difficult and time consuming than the 2019 SOTA models.”

(October 12, 2023) Semiconductor Engineering - There are two common major gaps in collecting useful “apples to apples” comparison data on NPU IP: [1] not specifically identifying the exact source code repository of a benchmark, and [2] not specifying that the entire benchmark code be run end to end, with any omissions reported in detail.

(September 26, 2023) SemiWiki - Assuming that Baby Llama is a good proxy for an edge based LLM, Quadric made the following interesting points. First, they were able to port the 15 million parameter network to their Chimera core in just 6 weeks. Second, this port required no hardware changes, only some (ONNX) operation tweaking in C code to optimize for accuracy and performance. Third they were able to reach 225 tokens/second/watt, using a 4MB L2 memory, 16 GB/second DDR, a 5nm process and 1GHz clock. And fourth the whole process consumed 13 engineer weeks.

(September 12, 2023) Towards AI - For these reasons, GPNPUs strike a balance between thoughtfully designed hardware for AI compute with the programmability and flexibility of a general-parallel compute platform like a GPU. GPNPUs satisfy the general compute and the memory organization requirements for operator fusion and are only limited occasionally by the memory availability requirement.

(August 23, 2023) The Ojo-Yoshida Report - Roddy sees Quadric’s strength in its ability to run different kernels doing different jobs – tasks classically thought of as DSP code, kernels for classic neural nets including one for a detector, another for an authenticator, and something in between doing CPU-like tasks – all on Quadric’s “single processor.” Roddy explained, “There’s no multiple engines inside the hood. There’s one actual processor, one execution pipeline, one code stream that all gets compiled together.”

(August 24, 2023) Semiconductor Engineering - What’s new today, in 2023, is that the rapid rush of machine learning inference is simultaneously disturbing nearly all types of subsystems. The known characteristics of proven building blocks that might have allowed a team to use heuristic approaches to size system resources — memory, bus bandwidth, I/O bandwidth, power management — are all disrupted.

(August 10, 2023) Semiconductor Engineering - While most fixed-function NN accelerators cannot run Vision Transformers at all, Quadric not only runs transformers, but is poised to continue to deliver large increases in performance – without hardware changes – as the CGC to LLVM compiler stack continues to mature and improve.