ABSTRACT:
Myriad 2 is a multicore always-on System-on-Chip supporting computational imaging and visual awareness for mobile, wearable, and embedded applications. The Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit (VPU) is based on the 128-bit SHAVE vector-processor and hardware acceleration pipeline backed by shared multicore memory subsystem and peripherals, and occupies 27mm2 in 28nm HPM-CMOS. The device has been designed to operate at 0.9V for nominal 600MHz operation, and contains 17 different power-islands coupled with extensive clock-gating under a software API to minimise power-dissipation. The 12 integrated SHAVE processors combined with video hardware accelerators achieve 1000 GFLOPS (fp16 type) at 600mW including peripherals and stacked 32-bit wide 128MB LP DDR2 DRAM operating at 533MHz. The VPU incorporates parallelism, ISA and microarchitectural features such as multi-ported register-files and hardware support for sparse data-structures, video hardware accelerators, configurable multicore and multiported memory banks; thus it provides exceptional and highly sustainable performance efficiency across a range of computational imaging and computer vision applications including those with low latency requirements on the order of milliseconds.