Machine learning (ML) software innovator Mipsology and design and development company OKI IDS Co., Ltd. (OKI IDS) signed an agreement on October 20 to join forces on hardware solutions for the Japanese high-speed image processing AI market. OKI IDS will leverage Mipsology’s best-in-class Zebra ML inference accelerator for application designs targeting the fast-growing ML needs in the Japanese market. Japanese corporations are embracing the revolution of AI while wanting to guarantee the high quality and high performance of their products across all markets, including automotive, industrial robotics, smart cities, medical applications, and video monitoring.
“We are excited by our collaboration with OKI IDS to supply the Japanese demand for neural network computation that supports high-speed, low-latency image processing,” said Ludovic Larzul, CEO and founder of Mipsology. “OKI IDS and Mipsology have a natural synergy and mutual expertise in FPGA design and machine learning that will result in our delivering industry-leading products based on FPGAs.”
ML development has historically centered on data-center-based GPUs, but today’s sophisticated ML applications require the ability to be deployed in real-world situations without sacrificing high performance, accuracy of results, and high quality of hardware. Zebra-enabled FPGAs can compute massive amounts of ML data with exceptionally high efficiency, 2.5X more than GPUs, and demonstrate lower power consumption, better environmental adaptability, and a significantly longer lifespan than GPUs, greatly reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). OKI IDS’s expertise in designing complex FPGA-based systems, now including ML capabilities, will allow OKI IDS customers to reach a multi-billion-dollar ML enabled system market faster with high quality solutions.
“Mipsology is the perfect partner to help us expand our ML development support services on FPGAs,” said Satoshi Shimizu, President and CEO, OKI IDS. “We expect the Japanese market for high-speed systems integrating ML and other functions into FPGAs to grow rapidly and substantially. FPGAs have no competition when it comes to adaptability, high performance, and high quality.”
OKI IDS’s expertise in integrating multiple functions in the same FPGA and leveraging the programmability of FPGAs around Zebra enables the company to quickly adapt products to new evolutions of ML. One solution designed by OKI IDS can adapt over many years to the new needs demanded by that application, thus reducing cost on updates and extending the life of the solution. Zebra enables rapid transition from training to execution on FPGAs with high-quality results, flattening the time and effort needed to deploy such solutions on a large scale. The collaboration between OKI IDS and Mipsology is a boon to product providers in areas such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and image recognition — at the edge or in data centers.