As the topic of AI artificial intelligence and IoT Internet of Things continues to heat up, the combination of the two produced 'AIoT' has led to changes in the industry. Ancient Greek physicist Archimedes once said: 'Give me a The fulcrum, I can pick up the earth. ' 'If we compare Zhongtianwei to a fulcrum, then our customers will be able to set off the entire AIOT market.' Chen Haoru, deputy general manager of Hangzhou Zhongtian Microsystems Co., Ltd. said.
With enough strength, I have enough strength to say this. Founded in 2001, Zhongtianwei has experienced 17 years of experience, and its products have been fully verified by the market and recognized by customers. As of the end of 2017, including Zhongtian Micro CPU IP has shipped more than 700 million chips, and it is expected to ship more than 400 million units in 2018. It is expected that shipments will exceed 2 billion units in three years. Currently, only domestic customers. And more than 100 ecological partners.
Zhongtianwei, which is growing rapidly, not only develops rapidly in product technology, but also develops its influence in the target market, and expands its existing product applications to the AIOT field.
At the summit, Zhongtian Micro released two CPU IPs, CK805 and CK860. Both of these new products are equipped with an AI acceleration engine, which can quickly help customers cut into the AIOT market, and provide AI and DSP for the field. Software Development Kit SDK, which is convenient for customers to develop applications on.
CK805 is a CPU IPS based on lightweight AI implementation. It is equipped with a powerful DSP engine. Users can implement hotspot applications such as voice, image and audio based on this technology. In some application scenarios, CK805 can be replaced. Lightweight DSP IP significantly reduces SoC design cost for customers. In terms of system architecture, CK805 supports 32-bit RSIC Core and 32-bit/16-bit variable-length instruction set, which can simultaneously complete 16-channel 8-bit multiply-accumulate, combined with AI acceleration. The engine can quickly realize local speech recognition. At the same time, support the AioT SoC reference design platform and software and hardware solutions, which greatly shortens the product development cycle and time to market, thereby improving the overall quality of the software and speeding up the deployment of application services.
In contrast, CK860 is a higher-end CPU IP, which can replace similar products of foreign related companies. CK860 is a multi-core CPU IP that carries AI acceleration function. Currently, only Zhongtian Micro can complete such products in the domestic market.
Compared with CK860 and Zhongtianwei's previous generation of high-performance CPU IP CK810, the overall AI performance has been improved by 32 times, and the versatility performance has been improved by 6 times. At the same time, users can make multi-core design architecture according to their own requirements. This CPU IP can be widely used. In the field of computing visual AIOT, low power consumption, low cost, and frequency can be improved to facilitate the realization of AIOT product requirements.
On a multi-core architecture, the CK860 can implement 1 to 4 core isomorphisms, 9 to 12 pipelines, 7 instructions in parallel (2load/store + 2 ALUs + 1 Branch + 2FPU/AI), and a SIMD calculation engine for AI optimization. , through load+store double-issue out-of-order storage subsystem, multi-channel, multi-mode data prefetch engine.
Chen Zhijian, senior manager of Zhongtian Micro CPU Design, said that CK860 is mainly for ultra-high performance computing, including AI algorithm and DSP optimized instruction set for computer vision, with a computing power of 50GOPS, which is more than 40% better than the previous generation. It is reported that CK860 has been authorized by many industry users, the entire chip development design exceeded expectations.
Chen Zhijian believes: 'The most important consideration for future IoT applications is security. We have created a multi-level engine for anti-physical attack technology, program signature technology, trusted execution technology, security software system, and cryptographic algorithm. Accelerated technology, covering the application of lightweight AI; at the same time, on the software security architecture, through the device certification, data security, trusted upgrade, secure storage, trusted debugging, trusted boot, etc. form a secure and open platform, and finally In the production line burning stage, we can use the secret key programming, factory image programming, and drive-guide, operation, data upload and other Turn-Key overall security solutions to ensure product safety.
'Our ultimate idea is to empower customers and strive for more market share. Only when the customer achieves success, is Zhongtianwei's success.' Chen Yu said. From the market feedback, AIoT will be the main in the next five years. Market application driver. Zhongtian Weixin's CPU IP can meet the application requirements of AIOT chips from high-performance computing, speech recognition, computational vision and acceleration of neural networks.
With intelligent cloud sound platform, power consumption costs are greatly reduced
In the past year, the smart speaker market has grown 10 times, and shipments have increased rapidly. After 2018, the entire market environment is changing rapidly. The products represented by Tmall Elf and Xiaoai Speaker are in low price penetration, opening a new A round of full-environmental competition.
Zhongtianwei senior design manager Lao Yuyuan believes that smart speakers are just the tip of the iceberg of the intelligent voice market, and the new era of 'everything voice' is kicking off. Smart TVs that can actually perform voice interactions have appeared in the market, and intelligent voice technology has already Infiltrate into every corner of our side. This will bring about a new kind of interaction, and Zhongtianwei will also take advantage of it.
The Zhongtian micro-intelligent cloud sound platform took two years and three months of research and development preparations, and officially unveiled at the summit. According to Lao Haoyuan, in the industry, the intelligent cloud sound platform can achieve the lowest power consumption and lowest cost. A solution that can be freely tailored. Its power consumption is one-tenth of the power consumption of the current domestic market, and the cost is reduced to one-half.
The essence of intelligent speech is the upgrade of interactive mode, but there will also be some new problems, such as how to deal with the signal problem of the microphone array, as well as neural network algorithms, scene differentiation, cloud integration and other problems that plague developers. Differently, Zhongtianwei does not graft the algorithm of the existing technology, but defines the architecture by algorithm and optimizes the architecture to greatly reduce the cost and power consumption. This initiative may be expected to promote more end products in the future. Import, drive the product to a full upgrade.
Do inclusive products, go all the way
In April 2018, Alibaba announced the full acquisition of Zhongtianwei, which caused great concern in the industry. In fact, Alibaba invested in Zhongtianwei for the first time in 2014, and pursued again in 2017. This year's wholly-owned acquisition is a matter of course. In response to the acquisition of Zhongtianwei, Alibaba Chairman Ma Yun said that Alibaba's chips are not for competition, but for making chips more inclusive.
At the same time, I am very optimistic about Zhongtianwei's CPU IP, and said: 'When we promoted Zhongtianwei's CPU IP, we found that many customers are still very interested, especially from the perspective of cost performance, Zhongtianwei's architecture is For domestic or overseas chip manufacturers, it is very advantageous from the perspective of cost performance.
It can be seen that in addition to the commercialization of products to the market, Zhongtianwei also has a parallel route for the specific solution of the platform in specific areas, namely, the product extension based on Alibaba Cloud Ecosystem under the Alibaba system. Synchronous expansion in three different directions, three ways to make the overall business model more diversified.
Chen Wei also said: 'Zhongtian Micro can provide customers with a comprehensive CPU IP. Customers can quickly design the entire system based on the reference design platform to shorten the time to market. At the same time, they can also authorize the self-developed SoC platform. Bringing Turnkey Solution to launch products more efficiently. In addition, after we acquired Alibaba, we made a more important move based on the powerful ecology of AliOS, combined with sound industrial development strategies, enabling customers to do more based on AliOS. Expansion and application. '
As for Ma Yun's response to the acquisition of Zhongtianwei to be an inclusive chip, Chen Yuxiao said: 'This is the multi-authorization of Zhongtianwei's CPU IP, and more good chips are coming out. The future imagination is very large.' It is reported that soon After that, Zhongtianwei will also release a new CPU IP, which will bring better service support and more choices to customers.