Arm Chooses NVIDIA Open-Source CNN AI Chip Technology

A few weeks ago, we covered ARM's announcement that it would be delivering a suite of AI hardware IP for Deep Learning, called Project Trillium. ARM announced at the time that third party IP could be integrated with the Trillium platform, and now ARM and NVIDIA have teamed up to do just that. Specifically the two companies will integrate NVIDIA's IP for the acceleration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the bread and butter for image processing and visually guided systems such as vehicles and drones. Without a lot of fanfare, NVIDIA's Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) was open-sourced last fall, providing free Intellectual Property (IP) licensing to anyone wanting to build a chip that uses CNNs for inference applications (inference, for those unfamiliar, is the processing of a trained neural network). The crying sound you're now hearing around the world is probably a bunch of well-funded startups and their investors who thought that a dozen guys in a garage could out-engineer NVIDIA when it came to CNN accelerator chips.