The NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) is an
open-source hardware neural network AI accelerator
An AI accelerator is a class of specialized hardware accelerator or computer system designed to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, including artificial neural networks and machine vision. Typical applications i ...
created by
Nvidia
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
. The accelerator is written in
Verilog
Verilog, standardized as IEEE 1364, is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. It is most commonly used in the design and verification of digital circuits at the register-transfer level of abstraction. It is als ...
and is configurable and scalable to meet many different architecture needs. NVDLA is merely an accelerator and any process must be scheduled and arbitered by an outside entity such as a CPU.
NVDLA is available for product development as part of Nvidia's Jetson Xavier NX, a small circuit board in a form factor about the size of a credit card which includes a 6-core
ARMv8
ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...
.2 64-bit CPU, an integrated 384-core
Volta GPU with 48 Tensor Cores, and dual NVDLA "engines", as described in their own press release.
Nvidia claims the product will deliver 14 TOPS (tera operations per second) of compute under 10 W.
[ Applications broadly include edge computing ]inference engine
In the field of artificial intelligence, an inference engine is a component of the system that applies logical rules to the knowledge base to deduce new information. The first inference engines were components of expert systems. The typical expert ...
s, including object recognition
Object recognition – technology in the field of computer vision for finding and identifying objects in an image or video sequence. Humans recognize a multitude of objects in images with little effort, despite the fact that the image of the ...
for autonomous driving
A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car, driver-less car, or robotic car (robo-car), is a car that is capable of traveling without human input.Xie, S.; Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Ding, Z.; Arvin, F.,Distributed Motion Planning for Sa ...
.
Nvidia's involvement with open hardware includes the use of RISC-V
RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five" where five refers to the number of generations of RISC architecture that were developed at the University of California, Berkeley since 1981) is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on estab ...
processors as part of their GPU product line-up.
References
External links
*{{Official website, http://nvdla.org/
Artificial neural networks