The Russian company IVA Technologies, part of the high-Tech group, has completed the development of a new completely original microprocessor architecture, and it has demonstrated impressive results in international tests. The appearance of chips based on it is expected in early 2021.
As CNews found out, in Russia in the first quarter of 2021, the first samples of domestic chips implemented on the latest IVA TPU processor architecture will be released. It was developed by the Russian company IVA Technologies, which is part of the high-Tech group.
The promise of this neural network-oriented architecture was confirmed during testing at the MLPerf site in late October 2020. This organization is an international consortium that was established in 2018 to develop universal tests that measure the effectiveness of artificial intelligence systems. MLPerf is founded by Baidu, Google, the universities of Harvard, Stanford, and California, as well as the University of Berkeley. The certifying working groups include employees from ARM, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, Cisco, Cray, and others.
During the tests, the IVA TPU architecture was also qualified (but not only) in the most complex, according to the developer, Closed Division Edge group — a closed list of networks with restrictions on modifications, waiting time, and accuracy.
"The analysis of the results shows that for one of the most common neural networks (Resnet-50), the IVA TPU architecture provides three times less latency than the Xilinx Alveo U250. In other words, IVA TPU surpasses the best solution of one of the world leaders, designed specifically for artificial intelligence, in a key parameter, " the developers explained to CNews. — It is planned that when implementing an accelerator with the IVA TPU architecture in the ASIC (special purpose integrated circuit; - approx. CNews) the results will be better than our closest competitor NVidia Jetson Xavier NX-despite the lag in technology: 28 nm vs. 12 nm."
"Successful participation in testing using a generally accepted method with a strict audit of the results is primarily an indicator of the maturity of the solution, its readiness for industrial use," said IVA Technologies Deputy CEO, head of the Department, in a conversation with CNews Evgeny Terentyev.
According to him, most of the neuroprocessors in the world, positioned as independent solutions, are actually a compilation of cores with third-party architecture. IVA Technologies has a completely original architecture. Terentyev has no doubt that it will be in demand not only in Russia, but also abroad.
According to IVA, the above-mentioned Closed Division Edge group, which tested the architecture, has only four vendors in the world so far: Nvidia, ARM, Centaur, and Xilinx. IVA Technologies was the fifth.
There will be no competition with "Elbrus " and" Baikal"
The development of the IVA TPU architecture, as Terentyev notes, began in the company at the beginning of 2016, and then this project caused complete bewilderment of colleagues in the market. Now the company is going to release two types of chips based on it (systems on a chip) on debugging boards — for embedded systems and for server applications. In addition, several module implementations are being developed based on microprocessors that will be directly used in customers ' electronic devices.
Thus, the developers believe that they will be able to create a wide product line that will meet the needs for computing resources for accelerated calculation of neural networks from completely different production and service companies.
According to IVA, we are talking about manufacturers of smart devices (smart cameras, Internet of things, industrial and urban security), developers of Autonomous machines (ADAS, drones), large service operators and data centers (photo and video data processing, text, voice, information security). The company also plans to start selling computing resources for solving problems using neural networks via a cloud service.
At the same time, Terentyev explained to CNews that the new chips will not compete with the main Russian processor lines "Elbrus" and "Baikal". Representatives of the latter are Central processors, while IVA chips are specialized coprocessors. This circumstance explains the consideration of NVidia as the main competitor.
Thus, IVA chips can not replace the "Elbrus" and "Baikal", but can be used together with them in software and hardware complexes for deploying neural networks.
Note that according to another classification, IVA chips will be tensor processors — one of the subspecies of neural chips that operate with special objects, so-called tensors, and are designed to perform a narrow range of mathematical operations. They are used in solving machine learning problems.
Some facts about " high-Tech»
Hightech is a group of companies that delivers and implements solutions in the field of information security, telecommunications, as well as engineering systems and it infrastructure facilities.
Co-founders of Hitek LLC, registered on November 21, 2013, according to the extract from the unified state register of legal entities, are Adam Basiev, Yury Mesropov and Olga Ilyagueva with 30% shares each, and Sergey Chernykh with a 10% share.
The former co-founder and CEO, as well as the current Chairman of the Board of Directors of the company is Nikolay Ivenev, former assistant to the state Duma Deputy of the VI convocation (2011-2016) - member of the defense Committee.
According to " Contour.focus", the company has 124 state contracts for a total of 1 billion rubles. Its customers include Ministry of interior, Ministry of Finance, "TransTeleCom", FAS, emergency, space-rocket center "Progress", the Corporation for air traffic management in Russia, "RT-inform", the "Granatum", It is etc.
At the end of 2019, the company demonstrated revenue of 1.3 billion rubles, with an increase of this indicator by 26% compared to the previous year and a net profit of 43.4 million rubles.
Since 2016, the company has been developing telecommunications equipment under the IVA Technologies brand. Today, it produces product lines that include the IVA MCU video conferencing platform, IVA IP phones, the IVA s/W wireless underwater communication mobile radio complex, and the IVA CV automatic face recognition system.
In June 2018 "Hatak" and the state Corporation "rostec» we have signed agreements on strategic cooperation. The agreement provided for joint activities to develop unified communications systems, data storage systems, artificial intelligence and machine vision. Automatika concern (part of rostec) has become a production site where high-Tech developments will be implemented.
In April 2020 CNews found out that within three years, Hightech will create and launch its own enterprise-level software and hardware communication platform-a competitor to Cisco and Avaya, spending a little more than 1 billion rubles.
