Poseidon, is our first design in GF 22nm technology. It contains three independent modules.
- Kerbin, which contains our brand new 64-bit RISC-V core Ariane. The core occupies about 175kGE in addition It has a 32 kB instruction (4-way) and 32kB data (8-way) cache. Post-layout simulation results show that it will operate at 910MHz at worst case conditions with a 0.72V supply.
- Quentin the newest version of our single core microcontroller from the PULP project - now released as PULPissimo on GitHub, updated with the powerful autonomous uDMA I/O subsystem from Mr. Wolf. Quentin also includes a tiny (70% of the size of the core) hardware accelerator for fully binary neural networks. When running at 0.8V supply, it can be clocked at 700MHz in typical conditions and consume 30mW witH SRAMs, or 15mW with standard cell based memories. When running at 0.65V, again in typical conditions, it can be clocked at 450MHz, consuming 12mW with SRAMs and only 6mW with standard cell based memories. It contains a a total of 512kB of memory.
- Hyperdrive Hyperdrive our latest binary neural network accelerator, with a logic complexity of 9.6 MGE including 6.4 Mbit memory. It is optimized for low power operation and modest operating speed. Its systolic architecture minimizes I/O bandwidth and thus significantly advances the state-of-the-art energy efficiency including I/O. Its architecture's systolic scalability happens in spatial direction, allowing to run deep CNNs such as ResNet-34 or ResNet-152 as feature extractors for high-quality, high-resolution image segmentation and object recognition. At 0.65V typical conditions, it runs at 160 MHz, and has a throughput of 250.9 GOp/s while consuming only 25.9mW - an energy efficiency of 6.1 TOp/s/W. At 0.9V, it operates at 344 MHz, 539.4 GOp/s using 171 mW with an energy efficiency of 3.2 TOp/s/W.
Poseidon, is usually shown with a Trident, which symbolizes the three designs we have in this chip. Also Neptun the roman version of Poseidon has a very prominent fountain in the middle of Bologna, our partners in crime in the PULP project.
Quentin is a homage to Quentin Tarantino which made Pulp Fiction one of our favorite movies, and inspiration to many of our chips. Kerbin has to do with the Kerbal Space Program, with Ariane being a Rocket that went Boom after launch. Hyperdrive continues the tradition of associating Star Wars with our machine learning engines, following Origami (which had Yoda as its logo), and YodaNN (a design that was not taped-out). Hyperdrive is the propulsion system that allows interstellar travel.
