Amou China “Zhouyi” Z2 AIPU officially released, doubled the performance and doubled the efficiency

October 13, 2020-Amou Technology (China) Co., Ltd. (“Amou China”) today officially released “Zhouyi” Z2 AIPU (AI Processing Unit), with a single calculation power up to 4TOPS, which is higher than “Zhouyi” Z1 The single-core computing power of AIPU is doubled, and it supports a scalable configuration of up to 32 cores, so that the powerful computing power of 128TOPS can be realized in a single SoC. “Zhouyi” Z2 AIPU extends the architecture of “Zhouyi” AIPU and optimizes the micro-architecture, thereby reducing the chip area by 30%. When running some neural network models, the performance can be improved by up to 100 under the same computing power configuration. %. In addition, the “Zhouyi” Z2 AIPU has also optimized the memory subsystem and upgraded the Advanced Bandwidth Saving Technology (ABST). In addition to the existing weight compression technology in the first generation, Feature map compression technology has also been added. The new “Zhouyi” Z2 AIPU will be mainly oriented to application scenarios such as mid-to-high-end security, smart cockpits, ADAS, and edge servers.

Liu Shu, Executive Vice President of Research and Development of Amou China, said: “In November 2018, Amou China released the’Zhouyi’ artificial intelligence platform, of which the’Zhouyi’ Z1 AIPU was the first official release after the establishment of the Amou China joint venture. Local research and development of IP products. In the past year or so,’Zhouyi’ Z1 AIPU has been trusted by many Chinese customers, and partners including Allwinner Technology have completed product development based on’Zhouyi’ Z1 AIPU And streaming. Today, we are very pleased to launch the brand new “Zhouyi” Z2 AIPU, which continues the architecture of the “Zhouyi” series of AIPU and the core features and advantages of programmability, which not only guarantees our partners in the “Zhouyi” The R&D and software investment on the platform, and at the same time, with higher computing power and scalability, has opened up a broader field of artificial intelligence applications for their chip products based on’Zhouyi’ AIPU.”

“Zhouyi” AIPU is an innovative AI dedicated processor independently developed by Amou China for deep learning. It adopts an innovative architecture design, provides a complete hardware and software ecology, and has the best balance of PPA. “Zhouyi” AIPU defines a new set of instructions suitable for AI algorithms for artificial intelligence calculations, and uses instructions to drive the vector processing units and fixed AI algorithm processing units inside to complete various complex network combinations. “Zhouyi” AIPU can support various AI calculations, and has good security, which can protect user data and AI algorithms.

“Zhouyi” AIPU has not only complete programmability, but also high efficiency of fixed AI computing power unit. The combination of the two forms a relatively balanced platform-based AI solution, which can support different developers and OEM manufacturers to convert classics. At the same time, the network can be customized with some computing requirements with its own characteristics.

Amou China also provides many tools for “Zhouyi” AIPU customers to help them develop, including emulators, compilers and debuggers for data collection and analysis. On top of the software framework, through the Arm Compute Library or partners’ editing heterogeneous computing libraries, it supports various popular interfaces such as Arm NN and Android NN, as well as the partners’ own OS and Runtime frameworks, which are provided by Arm China. After the driver layer can work normally. “Zhouyi” AIPU also supports mainstream AI scale frameworks in the industry, including TensorFlow, ONNX, etc., and will also support more different extension frameworks in the future.

Chen Feng, the vice president of Allwinner Technology, congratulated the official release of “Zhouyi” Z2 AIPU and said: “Since Allwinner adopted the “Z1 AIPU” customized R329 AI voice core, in the intelligent voice recognition scenario, through AI commands Expansion and algorithm hardware acceleration have been improved by more than 10 times compared with traditional chips; through the innovation of chip architecture, it also provides end-side speech recognition (ASR), speech synthesis (TTS), and even natural language understanding (NLP). Landing foundation. And these praiseworthy achievements are due to the good communication and cooperation between the two parties and the professional responsibility of Amou’s local R&D team in China, providing in-depth and reliable technical services and support for the product development of Allwinner R329; in the future, Allwinner Technology and Amou China will always maintain a high level of strategic cooperation. Amou China has always been an important partner of Allwinner Technology, and hopes that both parties will achieve long-term development in consumer electronics, automotive electronics, artificial intelligence and other fields in the future.”

Xinxin Yang, Vice President of Technology Technology, said: “I am very pleased to release the Z2 AIPU self-developed by Amou China. Amou China is a very important partner of Xinqing. Through the powerful computing power and flexible configuration of Z2, we can Perfectly realize the landing of artificial intelligence in automotive application scenarios. I hope that the cooperation between Xinqing and Amou China will provide the best products for smart cars, smart cities, and smart life.”

Tang Hu, general manager of Tongfang Weishi Artificial Intelligence R&D Center, said: “We are cooperating with Amou China on neural network processors. I wish the Zhouyi platform will get better and better.”

“Zhouyi” Z2 AIPU supports three configurations, namely: Z2-1104 with 4TOPS computing power, Z2-1002 with 2TOPS computing power and Z2-0901 with 1TOPS computing power. The development of the LAC version has been completed and will be before the end of the year. Provide all configured EAC versions to Chinese customers. It is expected that the customer chip equipped with “Zhouyi” Z2 AIPU will be available in 2021.