Xilinx’s new FPGA-powered Smart Network Interface Card (NIC) announcement opened the door for an introduction to Mipsology, a start-up that provides a software abstraction layer that it claims massively simplifies programming for the hardware acceleration silicon. Specifically, Mipsology is focused on video and images, and such services should facilitate increased adoption of FPGAs in core video workloads.
The headline news was that Xilinx had unveiled its new Alveo SN1000 Smart NIC – the evolution of the NIC that connects servers together and to the outside world. It incorporates a 64-bit 16-core Cortex-A72 ARM CPU into the design, to run the additional application code that sets a Smart NIC apart from a regular NIC.
However, a new set of services and integrations were the bigger draw, with Xilinx showing off a new AI-assisted ‘smart world AI video analytics solution,’ which caught our eye. Founded in 2015, headquartered in France, with around 40 staff, Mipsology is providing a software toolset that it claims allows for the easy migration of existing AI-assisted applications from GPUs and into the new Alveo FPGA-assisted platform.
This would then enable Xilinx to begin poaching customers that were historically using GPUs to power their AI workflows, as well as target new clients that want to use AI-based inference acceleration capabilities. For Mipsology, it hopes to get a slice of any such migration, with developers using its Zebra abstraction layer to get to grips with the finnicky FPGAs.
Wireless Watch’s sister service, Faultline, spoke to Mipsology founder and CEO Ludovic Larzul, and Robert Lara, who heads up go-to-market strategy and business development. Lara explained that in the course of the last 18 months, Mipsology had observed that while the strength of FPGAs was evident in AI, 5G and video workloads, their downside was the high level of hardware expertise that is needed to reprogram them.
Lara added that it seemed there was a clear industry consensus that once you make FPGAs easier to work with, they would take off and pass GPUs. This is where Zebra comes in, of course. Lara said that Zebra was something of a secret weapon for Xilinx, but Mipsology remains hardware-agnostic – meaning that Zebra should work with FPGAs from Intel’s Altera, as well as smaller outlets like Achronix, Lattice, or Microchip. The list of supported vendors currently stands at 14.
In addition to Mipsology, Aupera is on board with Xilinx, using the new FPGA capabilities to push a smart city and smart retail offering, using the Xilinx video processing suite for machine vision functions. DeepAI was also tapped, announcing a claimed 10x performance per cost advantage in AI system training tasks, when using the new FPGAs, compared to using GPUs.
The new interest in evolved NICs stems from FPGAs enabling new capabilities, allowing data to be processed on the NIC itself before sending it onward to the rest of the components in the server. This shift is from passive functions to active ones.
Intel had something like a 60% market share in NICs, and protecting that market share was one motivation to acquire FPGA maker Altera and so offer an augmented NIC.
Companies like Napatech were designing their own Smart NICs, and we took a look at a shiny new Xilinx-based offering at MWC 2018. Napatech was very aware that the FPGA vendors themselves wanted to expand into this market. Well, with the new Alveo SN1000, Xilinx has made that jump.
That year, Intel had won a reprieve, as Microsoft Azure was including an Intel FPGA inside every new server it commissioned, however, Microsoft committed to buying Xilinx FPGAs too, later in the year. Amazon’s AWS had also moved to offering FPGAs as a service too. The following year, Napatech had diversified its supply, moving from Xilinx-only to purchasing Intel silicon too.