Of the nearly twenty companies presenting at the event, three have made significant announcements in the AI hardware field in the past three months.
Chinese AI titans such as Alibaba, Baidu, Horizon Robotics, Huawei & DiDi Chuxing will present at the AI Hardware Asia Summit, alongside international innovators from IBM, SambaNova Systems, Graphcore, Flex Logix, Synopsys and many more…
Flex Logix, an established FPGA company that are targeting inference workloads in edge environments, announced their new inference coprocessor: the InferX X1. The chip is based on patented interconnect technology from its eFPGA chip designs. It combines the eFPGA tech with inference-optimized nnMAX clusters in the new combination chip. InferX X1 will be available as chips for edge devices and on half-height, half-length PCIe cards for edge servers and gateways. Co-Founder & SVP of Architecture & Engineering, Cheng Wang, will represent Flex Logix at the summit.
Earlier this month, US start up SambaNova Systems announced a $150 million Series B round led by Intel Capital & GV, in a bid to expand its work on a software-defined processing architecture for server-based AI workloads. The company draws on expertise from a variety of institutions including Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Stanford University and Dell EMC. Co-Founder & Chief Technologist, Kunle Olukotun, will be presenting at the summit.
In February, Horizon Robotics closed a $600 million Series B funding round led by SK China, taking the company’s valuation to $3 billion. The company has secured government contracts and business with SK’s telecoms unit, which is using Horizon’s technology to develop smart retail solutions. Co-Founder & CEO, Yu Kai, will represent Horizon Robotics at the summit. Dr. Yu was the founder and head of Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning, and sits on the Chinese government’s special advisory board for artificial intelligence.
“Two overarching efforts are indispensable in this AI chip development frenzy: objectively evaluating and comparing different chips (benchmarking), and reliably projecting the growth paths of AI chips (road mapping).” White Paper on AI Chip Technologies: Tsing Hua University & Beijing Innovation Center for Future Chips, December 2018.
The AI Hardware Asia Summit aims to introduce the US and Chinese markets to help build a roadmap of the global AI chip industry and assess emerging technologies for processing machine learning in the data center and at the Edge.