The Linley Group

Designers no longer need to worry about the costs of deep-learning acceleration: Nvidia is making the technology available for free. The company has extracted the deep-learning accelerator (NVDLA) from its Xavier autonomous-driving processor and is offering it for use under a royalty-free open-source license. It's managing the NVDLA project as a directed community, which it supports with comprehensive documentation and instructions. Nvidia delivers the NVDLA core as synthesizable Verilog RTL code, along with a step-by-step SoC-integrator manual, a run-time engine, and a software manual. The company's strategy in creating the open-source project is to foster more-widespread adoption of neural-network inference engines. It expects to thereby benefit from greater demand for its expensive GPU-based training platforms. Most neural-network developers train their models on Nvidia GPUs, and many use the Cuda deep-neural-network (cuDNN) library and software-development kit (SDK) to run models built in Caffe2, Pytorch, TensorFlow, and other popular frameworks.