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He conceded that the company has not normally been associated with open source products. Now it is offering Vitis.
“The new generation of engineers, are all about open source,” he said. “They don’t want to contact the supplier, they go online, look at forms and put things together. That’s what the new innovators and developers do,” he continued.
“Now we have open and free standards, high level development, files on GitHub. When you get open source community developing things too and adding value and creating things that’s really powerful,” he added.
The company is also building an ecosystem and, with the Vitis announcement, moving from offering validation boards to development boards. “We are going to be more like that all the time now; a new architecture and there will be new boards immediately,” he confirmed.
Peng outlined the key focus areas for the company. “Data centres is the fastest growing market. We were the newest there but we have something to offer. 5G has been our traditional market and now is of course the time to lean in and we have been in automotive for more than a decade, starting in infotainment and now we have ADAS,” said Peng.
“ADAS is still going to be where the money is for many years to come but autonomous vehicles take longer,” he said, adding that ADAS’s safety and security tests are rigorous and lengthy.
Peng also defined artificial intelligence (AI) as a disruptive technology which will be significant. “People talk about AI as though it’s a market. AI is not a market it’s a technology that is in everything. . . We are still in the early days and people are doing a lot of training and that’s why they need boatloads of compute performance,” he told reporters.
According to Peng, disruption spawns new architectures and start ups but this is not always sustainable. He believes AI will break the mould of disruption, then a period of stability as the industry adapts. “But AI is a different animal, that is going to keep changing for years to come. . . . In that sense this need for domain specific architectures is going to keep going and that is why we think we have something to offer that other fixed architectures don’t,” he said.
Referring to Vitis, he added, “If there is a new network you can just deploy the same piece of silicon. If you have a new technique to quantise without accuracy loss and you can improve the accuracy and reduce the power, you can deploy it,” Peng said.
He believes disruption will be seen for some time and across multiple industries and believes that the ability to implement architectural, algorithmic innovations without a whole new silicon tapeout is powerful, and will give engineers an edge to innovate and meet the challenges of disruptive technologies like AI.
