[HN Gopher] Mythic Rolls Out M1000-Series Analog AI Accelerators
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Mythic Rolls Out M1000-Series Analog AI Accelerators
        
       Author : rbanffy
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2021-08-31 14:23 UTC (19 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fuse.wikichip.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fuse.wikichip.org)
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | That kind of thing is great for wake-word recognition where it is
       | powered up and running all the time.
        
         | datameta wrote:
         | Potentially just a few of those cores alone will allow for
         | wakeword recognition! This in-memory analog compute
         | breakthrough is to me, in the truest sense of the word,
         | mindblowing. I've been following Mythic since learning of
         | memristor-based tech for TinyML applications and I'm beyond
         | extremely impressed with not just the engineering but also the
         | market interaction side of it.
        
       | dogma1138 wrote:
       | If these are going to be cheap it would be a game changer for the
       | hobbyists/ hacker market, get the M.2 version and an SBC or a
       | board for this and the Pi compute module run your main logic on
       | the ARM CPU and use this the Mythic chip as an accelerator for
       | object recognition or localization.
       | 
       | Now it will all boil down to software and how easy would it be to
       | use these darn things, if they are going to be cheap enough it
       | doesn't even matter if they'll become obsolete quickly since
       | you'll be able to just swap them.
        
       | nharada wrote:
       | So this is purely for inference right? Basically you're setting
       | up a physical analog inference device by writing weights to flash
       | memory and then using the device properties to do that mat-muls
       | required for the forward pass?
       | 
       | This is super cool, I'd really like to see how this shakes out in
       | actual products in terms of models supported, actual costs and
       | performance, etc.
        
       | TheAdamist wrote:
       | Flash has limited write cycles, I wonder what the lifetime of
       | these chips are supposed to be. I would think trying to compute
       | with them would hit that limit very quickly.
       | 
       | Consumable chips I guess.
        
         | lern_too_spel wrote:
         | The weights are loaded once per model, so you would only have a
         | write when you update the model, which happens once every few
         | hours or days for most applications today.
        
         | Eyght wrote:
         | My mind immediately went to the artificial 4-year lifespan of
         | the Nexus-6 replicants in Blade Runner.
        
           | sdenton4 wrote:
           | "The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long...
           | And you, you, Roy, have used oh so many write-cycles."
        
       | base3 wrote:
       | Positronic brains!
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-09-01 10:02 UTC)