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Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14768/hot-chips-31-live-blogs-xilinx-versal-ai-engine
Hot Chips 31 Live Blogs: Xilinx Versal AI Engine
by Dr. Ian Cutress on August 20, 2019 2:25 PM EST
02:34PM EDT - Xilinx, the manufacturer of FPGAs, announced its new Versal AI engine last year as a way of moving FPGAs into the AI domain. This talk is set to expand on those announcements.
02:36PM EDT - Xilinx device categories: FPGA, SoC, ACAP. Versal is ACAP
02:37PM EDT - ACAP = Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform
02:37PM EDT - Scalar processors, programmable logic, AI engines/DSP engines, onboard networking
02:38PM EDT - Currently shipping samples to early customers
02:38PM EDT - TSMC 7nm, 37B transistors, 855 Mb on-die memory, 400 engine cores, 785 IOs, 44 SerDes
02:39PM EDT - Versal NOC - vertical NOC and horizontal NOC
02:39PM EDT - Packetized NOC, Aggressive clock gating
02:40PM EDT - >1 Tbps bidrectional bandwidth per row, >0.5 Tbps bidirectional bandwidth per column
02:40PM EDT - Always have virtual channels in the NOC
02:40PM EDT - Compute acceleration is all about data movement
02:41PM EDT - Unified Memory Subsystem
02:43PM EDT - 2nd gen CCIX
02:44PM EDT - Coherent Home Node, and L2 cache
02:45PM EDT - CCIX ESM - supports PCIe Gen 5 x16
02:45PM EDT - Versal Processor System
02:45PM EDT - in all Versal devices
02:46PM EDT - Dual core a72
02:46PM EDT - Dual Core R5 RPU w/locksetp
02:46PM EDT - Platform Management Control
02:47PM EDT - Crypto accelerators for security
02:47PM EDT - 10 Gbps Debug and trace interface
02:48PM EDT - 50 Gbps config interface
02:48PM EDT - Hardware RoT
02:48PM EDT - SHA3 engine, AES, RSA, AES-key
02:48PM EDT - Programmable logic - 900K LUTs, 2M LC, and 1.8M FLOPs
02:48PM EDT - 4x larger CLB -> 64 flip flops
02:48PM EDT - 158 Mb of URAM and BRAM - 50% lower power than prev gen
02:48PM EDT - Versal Programmable Logic DSP, DSP58
02:48PM EDT - 1958x DSP58 with FP support
02:49PM EDT - 400 AI Engine Tiles, 133 TOPs in INT8
02:49PM EDT - Non-blockign interconnect mesh
02:49PM EDT - 12.5MB L1 distributed memory
02:51PM EDT - In AI engine: 32b Scalar RISC Processor, 2 scalar ops/stream access, 512-bit SIMD vector processor, vec128int8 or vec8fp32, 7+ OPs per cycle VLIW
02:51PM EDT - 128 INT8 MACs per cycle per core
02:51PM EDT - Suited for signal processing workloads
02:52PM EDT - Data movement is done through orchistrated DMA
02:53PM EDT - Memory caches supports multicast/broadcast
02:53PM EDT - Very efficient transmission of streamed data
02:56PM EDT - Versal offers deterministic performance and low latency
02:56PM EDT - Map the compute onto different parts of the ACAP
02:57PM EDT - Software programmable framework
02:58PM EDT - Trying to abstract the programming from hardware into regular C++
02:58PM EDT - Frameworks like mxnet, TensorFlow, Caffee
02:59PM EDT - First Xilinx 7nm device, 133 TOPs, PCIe Gen4 and CCIX
02:59PM EDT - Adaptable heterogeneous system architecture
03:00PM EDT - Q&A
03:00PM EDT - Q: HBM? A: Coming
03:01PM EDT - Q: Support CCIX? Support for Gen-Z and CXL? You're members of those consortiums. A: No official plan on Gen-Z. CXL is still new.
03:01PM EDT - That's a wrap. Next talk is Intel's Spring Crest.