Andes Technology (TWSE:6533), a leading supplier of high-efficiency, low-power 32/64-bit RISC-V processor cores and Founding Premier member of RISC-V International, today announced the launch of new product line, AndesAIRE™ or Andes AI Runs Everywhere, ultimately efficient
solutions designed for edge and end-point inference, including the first generation of AI/ML hardware accelerator intellectual property (IP), the AndesAIRE™ AnDLA™ I350 (Andes Deep Learning Accelerator), and the neural network software tools and
runtimes, the AndesAIRE™ NN SDK.
With the explosive growth of AI/ML applications, there is a critical need for high
performance-efficient deep learning solutions that can operate at the edge and end- point, where the strict power and energy constraints make it difficult to only rely on CPU architecture. The AnDLA™ I350 is specifically designed to address this challenge by delivering industry-leading efficiency, low power, and small area, making it ideal for use in a wide range of edge inference applications, from smart IoT devices and smart cameras to smart home appliances and robotics.
The AndesAIRE™ AnDLA™ I350 is built on top of Andes strength on compute
acceleration from the proven CPU technologies and experiences accumulated over the past 18 years, providing a high performance-efficient platform for AI/ML
acceleration. It supports popular deep learning frameworks, such as TensorFlow Lite, PyTorch, and ONNX, and performs versatile neural network operations such as convolution, fully-connect, element-wise, activation, pooling, channel padding, upsample, concatenation, etc. in the int8 data type. It also features an internal Direct Memory Access (DMA) and local memory, utilizing the best computing power of the hardware engines. Operation fusion techniques are also adopted in the AnDLA™ I350 to perform most common operator sequences more efficiently. The key configurable parameters of AnDLA™ I350 include the MAC number from 32 to 4096, and SRAM size from 16KB to 4MB, and provide flexible computing power from 64 GOPS to 8 TOPS (at 1 GHz) for a wide range of applications.
The AndesAIRE™ NN SDK is a comprehensive set of software tools and runtimes for end-to-end development and deployment. It includes the following components:
- AndesAIRE™ NNPilot™: a neural network optimization tool suite
- AndesAIRE™ TFLM for AnDLA™: an AnDLA™-optimized inference framework running on a host based on TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollersk
- AnDLA™ driver and runtime
The NNPilot™ can automatically analyze input NN models, apply model pruning and quantization, and generate AnDLA™ executable based on its configuration to perform inference together with the TFLM framework. The NNPilot™ also generates sample host C code to invoke the AnDLA™ driver in the bare metal environment.
To address the evolving and rapidly advancing AI technologies, Andes’ vision is an
extensible AI subsystem, which seamlessly integrates AndesAIRE™ AnDLA™,
AndesCore™ RISC-V CPU, and Andes Custom Extension™ (ACE). In such a subsystem, most structural and time-consuming parts of the AI workloads can be computed
efficiently in the AnDLA™ while less structural computations such as non-linear functions can be offloaded to the powerful and flexible RISC-V CPUs with DSP/SIMD or Vector extensions. The ACE plays a key role for efficient data movement between the CPU and the AnDLA™ to reduce significant memory bandwidth and power consumption while increasing hardware utilization. The ACE can facilitate even faster processing by generating customized instructions for domain-specific applications, such as data pre- or post-processing. In addition to the extensibilities from hardware IP’s, Andes commits to continuous advancement of AndesAIRE™ NN SDK and AndesAIRE™ NN Library for the mass-production SoCs to adopt the future AI
algorithms. Andes had added more than one hundred compute library APIs yearly since 2021, and we will keep optimizing and adding new functions into NN SDK and NN library in the future.
“Andes Technology is thrilled to introduce our new product line for AI/ML solutions, the AndesAIRE™ AnDLA™ I350 and the AndesAIRE™ NN SDK, an exceptional
performance-efficient hardware and an end-to-end software solution for edge and end-point inference,” said Dr. Charlie Su, CTO and President of Andes Technology. “With the AndesAIRE™, we are empowering developers and innovators to create extensible and future-proof AI/ML SoCs and applications.”
“AndesAIRE™ product line projects our vision for the AI/ML market,” said Simon TC Wang, Senior Technical Marketing Manager of Andes Technology. “By combining the advantages from RISC-V CPUs, the AnDLA™, and the ACE into an AI subsystem, the performance, power consumption, and area can be well-balanced for customers to deliver competitive solutions. Furthermore, the flexibility is guaranteed by RISC-V CPUs and NN software stack, and the extensibility is affluent for customers to
differentiate their unique value for target AI/ML applications.”
The AndesAIRE™ AnDLA™ I350 and the AndesAIRE™ NN SDK are available for
licensing now in an early-adopter program. For more information, please visit the Andes Technology website at “http://www.andestech.com/en/products-solutions/andesaire-ai/”.
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