2021 BRN Discussion, page-2538

The table was only for attention so as the two parts are read in whole and no its not all about Hailo


Compare directly at your own risk
We wanted to summarize these different architectures in some succinct manner, but it’s very hard to do. Apples-to-apples comparisons are almost impossible, unless a common model on a common network is run on different architectures. Benchmarks are intended to provide this, but there simply aren’t benchmark results available for most of these architectures. And even if there were, the existing benchmark networks are considered too small to give meaningful results.
What we’re left with are marketing numbers. They aren’t necessarily evil, but they do have to be viewed with a clear eye. We’ve pulled a few simple parameters together into a table. They’re best for getting a sense of which applications the different devices are intended for. They’re not useful for directly comparing which device is better. All data (unless otherwise noted) comes from the respective company, edited only for brevity.
The three main parameters are performance, power, and efficiency:

• TOPS (tera-operations per second) is a common, but not universal, speed metric. It’s a very imperfect measure, but unlike latency it is a feature of the hardware rather than the application. It’s also incomplete. A clever architecture with a lower TOPS number may be faster than a less-clever one with a higher TOPS rating.
• Power reflects the general power range. It’s not a guarantee, but it helps to position the architecture in the chart shown in the first part of this survey.
• Efficiency is performance per watt. This isn’t the arithmetic combination of the first two numbers, because a high-performance configuration typically is different from a low-power configuration. Efficiency needs to reflect performance and power in the same configuration. That’s why this is listed separately.

We also list a few other considerations:

• The “brand” is the device, architecture, or technology brand, which may not be the same as the company name.
• Differentiation will be a few words summarizing “what’s different about” the architecture.
• The “how sold” box reflects how the architecture is available. At least one is an IP block; the others are silicon. Some are available by the chip, others are available only on modules or cards. There are various different card formats available. The table doesn’t detail that. It details whether cards are an option. “Cards” and “modules” are both called “cards” in the table.
• Application focus is the company’s take on the kinds of tasks they’re addressing. Different architectures can be used for other things, because it’s often a question of market focus rather than technology. But a good vision architecture might not do well for non-vision applications. And even within vision, not all applications are alike.
• AUTHOR
• Bryon Moyer is a technology editor at Semiconductor Engineering. He has been involved in the electronics industry for more than 35 years. The first 25 were as an engineer and marketer at all levels of management, working for MMI, AMD, Cypress, Altera, Actel, Teja Technologies, and Vector Fabrics. His industry focus was on PLDs/FPGAs, EDA, multicore processing, networking, and software analysis. He has been an editor and freelance ghostwriter for more than 12 years, having previously written for EE Journal. His editorial coverage has included AI, security, MEMS and sensors, IoT, and semiconductor processing to his portfolio. His technical interests are broad, and he finds particular satisfaction in drawing useful parallels between seemingly unrelated fields. He has a BSEE from UC Berkeley and an MSEE from Santa Clara University. Away from work, Bryon enjoys music, photography, travel, cooking, hiking, and languages.