Neil Robinson, Segment Marketing representative in the IP Group at Cadence, demonstrates the company's latest embedded vision technologies and products at the January 2017 Consumer Electronics Show. Specifically, Robinson demonstrates Microsoft's HoloLens, an untethered, battery-operated headset which needs to process its environment’s geography, track location and orientation, recognize gestures and voice commands and project the virtual world on top of the real one in real-time.
All of that processing still has to be kind to your batteries and aware of heat dissipation limitations. When CPUs and GPUs can’t deliver within the power budget, you’ve got to design something yourself that can. Microsoft did that quickly by customizing a Tensilica processor and deploying 24 of them in the Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) – capable of handling 1 trillion calculations per second! Around 300 instructions were added and the resulting processor came in under the power budget with a speed-up of around 200x compared to running on a CPU.
