Military neural processor chip comes out of stealth mode

KnuEdge Inc. (San Diego), a company that has raised more than $100 million since it was founded in 2005, announced the KnuPath processor, a neuromorphic processor intended to accelerate voice recognition and other machine learning applications.

Dan Goldin, who led the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) throughout its renaissance in the 1990s, is the founder and CEO.

The KnuPath processor is already in production and in use at customer sites, KnuEdge said. At the same time the company launched KnuVerse, its voice-recognition and authentication software. The company said it has been supplying the software for military applications for five years.

KnuEdge has also divided itself into multiple operations to better drive sales forward. These are: hardware operation KnuPath, software operation KnuVerse and service operation Knurld. Knurld delivers the same neuromorphic computation technologies to a broader market via Knurld.io, a public cloud API service that allows developers to incorporate voice authentication into their proprietary products.

The KnuPath processor, codenamed Hermosa, is described as a LambdaFabric processor and is generally intended to be deployed in datacenters where its ability to scale can be used. The KnuPath LambdaFabric is designed to scale up to 512k devices and offers a rack-to-rack latency of 400ns, approaching half that of existing high-speed interconnects, the company said.

Each KnuPath processor includes 256 DSP cores, 64 programmable DMA engines, an integrated L1 router to provide a maximum performance of 256-Gflops/s and 3,702Gbytes/s of memory bandwidth. There are 16 bi-directional IO paths per processor chip delivering 320 Gbps-per processor and the chip consumes 34 Watts.

This is about 100 watts per TeraFLOP or 100 kilowatts per PetaFLOP.

Hermosa outperforms the newest competing GPUs by 2.7 to 8.1x, as measured by key benchmarks like FFT, Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiply and k-means Clustering.

KnuVerse™ delivers proven military-grade voice recognition and authentication technology that unlocks the potential of voice interfaces to power next-generation computing. While the voice technology market has exploded over the past five years due to the introductions of Siri, Cortana, Google Home and Alexa, the aspirations of most commercial voice technology teams are still on the drawing board because of security and noise issues.

Within KnuVerse, knurld.io delivers a cloud-based public API service that vastly simplifies the ability for any application developer to incorporate KnuVerse’s robust speaker identity and security capabilities into their own application.

KnuVerse has solved two fundamental problems that exist in all voice-interface technologies to date: noise and security. This will change the way humans interact with technology, and banking, tech, entertainment and hospitality industries (among others) are able to innovate new products and services at an unbelievable pace. KnuVerse™ voice technology is military-grade, proven in battlefield conditions.

SOURCE – EEtimes, KnuEdge