Vivante GC7000XS/VX Vision GPU brings artificial intelligencecapability to NXP’s i.MX 8

VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd. (VeriSilicon) has announced that NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ:NXPI) has selected its Vivante GC7000XS/VX Vision GPUs for use with NXP’s latest flagship i.MX 8 applications processor.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon be a part of everyday lives thanks to NXP’s latest i.MX 8.  AI can solve problems much the way that the human brain does by detecting and classifying patterns in audio, video and sensor data.  This problem-solving ability allows i.MX 8 to do things considered impossible by a SoC only a few short years ago like natural language processing and image / object detection.  This ability is powered by the VeriSilicon Vivante GC7000XS/VX Vision GPUs that has built-in AI engines.
While AI has been deployed in software for years now, i.MX 8 marks one of the first instances of an AI engine being represented in silicon and enables a whole host of new practical AI applications in the embedded device market.

“When we started planning for i.MX 8 – we knew that we wanted to include the ability to go beyond just sophisticated graphics and audio,” said Geoff Lees, senior vice president and general manager of microcontrollers at NXP. “We wanted i.MX 8 to be able to understand what it was seeing, hearing and sensing and the Vivante GC7000XS/VX brought us that unique capability in a powerful, yet power efficient IP package.  We are excited about the prospects of helping our customers exploit this groundbreaking technology inside of i.MX 8 with their products.”

“We are delighted that NXP chose the GC7000XS/VX Vision GPU for their i.MX 8 product family.  NXP’s early adoption of the AI and GPU combined processor (GC7000, VIP7000) showed tremendous foresight and i.MX 8 has arrived at exactly the right time for markets requiring embedded AI. Today,thegeneral application processor SoC providers are rapidly moving toward incorporate AI capabilities.” said Weijin Dai, Executive Vice President and GM of Intellectual Property Division at VeriSilicon. “This is a continuation of our strong partnership with NXP delivering highly efficient graphics and AI solutions to the i.MX family from i.MX 6 to i.MX 7 and now i.MX 8 with the best in class Power, Performance and Area (PPA) to NXP’s scalable i.MX family solutions.”

Strong AI Ecosystem
The GC7000XS/VX implementation inside i.MX 8 fully supports industry standard APIs essential for development of embedded AI solutions including highly optimized OpenCL and OpenVXdrivers.  Also available is the Vivante ACUITYTMSDK that enables neural net training via a complete set of IDE tools.