
Former NASA chief unveils $100M neural chip maker KnuEdge - dnqthao
http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/06/former-nasa-chief-unveils-100-million-neural-computing-chip-company-knuedge/
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daveguy
This part of the article struck me as very interesting:

KnuVerse solutions are based on patented authentication techniques using the
human voice – even in extremely noisy environments – as one of the most secure
forms of biometrics.

Of course that requires a very significant [[citation needed]]. I would like
to see their performance in that task or at least the specific patents that
allow them to provide the most secure authentication method even in extremely
noisy environments.

EDIT: Google Patent shows nothing for KnuEdge, KnuPath or KnuVerse. They must
have a very-differently-named shell company for the patents.

~~~
dgacmu
I find it amusing that they're touting it for an application where I find it
quite likely that similar NN algorithms will excel at generating speech in
someone else's voice. (c.f., "neural style transfer" in images, but applied to
speech.) We're already getting pretty decent at this for video -- see, for
example,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk)
(Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment)

~~~
dharma1
was just trying to find papers for that yesterday - neural style for
voice/audio. Conceptually it sounds it should be doable, but looking at the
actual implementation, I'm not sure it's doable at all with a CNN for audio.

~~~
zopf
Unsure if it's CNN-based, but check out
[http://www.wowtune.net/](http://www.wowtune.net/)

~~~
dharma1
very impressive, even if a bit out of tune on the Autumn Leaves demo!

They have a very good team with actual audio industry experience. Look forward
to seeing more demos.

It sounds like a phoneme based speech/singing synthesizer, similar to Yamaha
Vocaloid. I wonder how much training data is required to extract the phonemes
to create a "voice"

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_-__---
Here's some spec on the chip itself (KnuEdge seems to be a larger holdings
company of sorts, the chip is more associated with subsidiary KNUPATH):

[https://www.knupath.com/products/hermosa-
processors/](https://www.knupath.com/products/hermosa-processors/)

~~~
jerrysievert
i do wonder what the ARM license is being used for - acting as an interface to
the cores themselves?

~~~
elij
Looks like an FPGA with only the DSPs and no logic units.

The SoC is probably used in the same way (high level tasks like networking
etc.) as it is in FPGA land.

~~~
mud_dauber
Agreed. I've seen a few similar mockups that used a processor IP as the chip-
level "traffic cop".

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melbourne_mat
There isn't much technical in the article, but it does remind me a bit of the
adapteva epiphany.

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sjclemmy
> “I thought, holy smokes,” he said. “It’s going to be too expensive. It’s not
> propulsion. It’s not environmental control. It’s not power. This software
> business is a very big problem, and that nation couldn’t afford it.”

I think the difficult thing about space travel and exploration is that it is
all of the above.

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thegp
Wonder how similar to
[http://www.artificialbrains.com/spinnaker](http://www.artificialbrains.com/spinnaker)
this is

~~~
blennon
From the article and their website, it doesn't seem like KnuEdge's compute
units are spiking neurons. Spinnaker and IBM 's TruNorth using spiking neurons
to compute.

~~~
thegp
Well, not quite. Spinnaker is OPTIMIZED for spiking neurons, but in theory you
could run standard computations on it. It is just really messy (speaking form
experience).

The main idea behind Spinnaker as far as I understood it is "cheap cores, lots
of them, architecture for message passing and load distrubtion vaguely
inspired by human brain". This rang similar on a first read

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thomasrossi
Super nice, is it an asic designed for ML algorithms? Which ones? Well, I
wouldn't call it a startup though, 100 employees, 10 years of development.

------
verytrivial
I must admit to being reminded of the Cell CPU hype, which is perhaps another
case of a solution looking for a problem.

~~~
gaggia
Mmmhmmm. I agree.

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jrowley
I wonder what the clock network topology looks like on a chip with 256 cores.

~~~
jacquesm
If they're implementing neural nets they don't necessarily need to do so cycle
synchronously. Think of it as a specialized cluster on a chip.

~~~
tonmoy
I think the commenter is talking about the KnuPath chip.

>And it (each core) will run C++ software, something that is already very
popular. Programmers can program each one of the cores with a different
algorithm to run simultaneously

Running C++ almost certainly has to be done synchronously

~~~
jacquesm
[https://www.knupath.com/products/hermosa-
processors/](https://www.knupath.com/products/hermosa-processors/)

Is a diagram of that chip. You don't actually run 'C++ software', you run a
binary and if you have a cluster on a chip you are perfectly capable of
running each node in the cluster on its own clock net, with high speed links
connecting the nodes.

