AMD unveils new adaptive SoCs as Versal Gen 2 chips to compete in the AI market

It’s all about AI hardware at the moment and there are always new announcements about it from various companies. Now AMD is coming up with a new announcement to further compete in this market. For this reason, it is presenting its new adaptive SoCs Versal Gen 2 chips.

For Manuel Uhm, Director of Versal Adaptive SoC Marketing, one thing is clear. The market of embedded AI, video and control applications has grown rapidly and requires heterogeneous processing to accelerate end-to-end computation with limited space and power consumption. That’s why AMD is announcing its second generation of adaptive SoCs, Versal Gen2 chips, to continue to meet the demand.

“As embedded AI, video, and control applications explode, there is a growing need for heterogeneous processing to accelerate end-to-end compute within tight area and power constraints. Multi-chip processing solutions come with significant power, area, and complexity overhead; instead, designers need support for flexible, real-time preprocessing, efficient AI inference, and high-performance postprocessing on a single device.”

Two new chips are being launched. The first is the AMD Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 SoCs and the second is the AMD Versal Prime Series Gen 2. These two chips are intended to provide single-chip intelligence for AI-driven and classic embedded systems. It is important to maintain a balance between performance, power consumption, area, functional safety and security functions. The chip includes a 4-core Arm Mali-G78AE GPU with up to 268 GFLOPs of compute as well as up to 10x Arm Cortex-R52 real-time processors. Thanks to the new X5IO, the chips support DDR5/LPDDR5X, LVDS and other standards.

The Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 devices enable end-to-end acceleration with a unique integration of heterogeneous processors that support all three phases of embedded computing. The first is sensor processing, fusion and data preparation, and the second is AI inference. In other words, the execution of deep learning algorithms. Lastly, post-processing, i.e. decision-making and the resulting actions.

In addition, the Versal Prime Series Gen 2 devices are designed to offer extreme performance in the smallest of spaces, with flexible sensor processing in real time and complex embedded computing workloads, thus setting new standards for classic embedded systems. With new hardware IP, the chips are suitable for applications such as UHD streaming and recording, robotics and flight computers, as they have a high throughput for video processing, including 8K multi-channel workflows.

We will see how AMD will fare with its new chips in the future. However, it is not yet known when it will be released.

Source: AMD