Industry Expert Blogs

Your Spreadsheet Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story.

Thinking of adding an NPU to your next SoC design? Then you’ll probably begin the search by sending prospective vendors a list of questions, typically called an RFI (Request for Information) or you may just send a Vendor Spreadsheet. These spreadsheets ask for information such as leadership team, IP design practices, financial status, production history, and – most importantly – performance information, aka “benchmarks”.

It's easy to get benchmark information on most IP – these benchmarks are well understood. For an analog I/O cell you might collect jitter specs. For a specific 128-pt complex FFT on a DSP there’s very little wiggle room for the vendor to shade the truth. However, it’s a real challenge for benchmarks for machine learning inference IP, which is usually called an NPU or NPU accelerator.

Why is it such a challenge for NPUs? There are two common major gaps in collecting useful “apples to apples” comparison data on NPU IP: [1] not specifically identifying the exact source code repository of a benchmark, and [2] not specifying that the entire benchmark code be run end to end, with any omissions reported in detail

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