Move Over GPUs: Startup's Chip Claims to Do Deep Learning Inference Better
Habana Labs, a startup that came out of "stealth mode" this week, announced a custom chip that is said to enable much higher machine learning inference performance compared to GPUs. According to the startup, its Goya chip is designed from scratch for deep learning inference, unlike GPUs or other types of chips that have been repurposed for this task. The chip's die is composed of eight VLIW Tensor Processing Cores (TPCs), each having their own local memory, as well as access to shared memory. The external memory is accessed through a DDR4 interface. The Goya chip supports all the major machine learning software frameworks, including TensorFlow, MXNet, Caffe2, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, PyTorch and the Open Neural Network Exchange Format (ONNX).