SiMa.ai recently unveiled MLSoC™ Modalix, the industry’s first multi-modal Edge AI product family. Designed to support CNNs, Transformers, LLMs, LMMs, and Generative AI at the edge, the SiMa.ai MLSoC Modalix delivers exceptional performance, offering over 10 times the performance per watt compared to other solutions.
The rise of generative AI is transforming how humans and machines collaborate, with the next phase of AI technology focusing on multi-modal systems capable of processing diverse inputs—text, images, audio, and video. This shift will impact industries ranging from agriculture and logistics to healthcare, defence, and transportation. SiMa.ai’s multi-modal Edge AI platform is built to provide organisations with ultra-responsive, power-efficient, and reliable insights, tailored to their specific modality requirements.
The MLSoC Modalix range will allow developers to maximise performance within a small power footprint, supporting a wide array of applications. With the ability to run end-to-end Generative AI application pipelines on a single chip, the solution enables measurable improvements in business performance.
MLSoC Modalix is the second generation of SiMa.ai’s successful MLSoC, already in commercial use. The Modalix family is available in configurations delivering 25 (Modalix 25 or “M25”), 50 (Modalix 50 or “M50”), 100 (Modalix 100 or “M100”), and 200 (Modalix 200 or “M200”) TOPS. It is offered in various form factors and is purpose-built to streamline the deployment of Generative AI at the embedded edge. Fully compatible with the first-generation MLSoC, the Modalix product family supports DNNs and advanced Transformer models, including LLMs, LMMs, and Generative AI. Samples of MLSoC Modalix will be available to customers in Q4 of 2024.
“SiMa.ai is leading the Edge AI market and building increasing momentum as customers around the world continue to adopt our (first generation) MLSoC. We are excited to introduce the MLSoC Modalix family to give customers even greater choice and flexibility to embrace multi-modal AI,” said Krishna Rangasayee, Founder and CEO at SiMa.ai. “With the introduction of MLSoC Modalix, SiMa.ai’s ONE Platform for Edge AI now provides coverage from CNNs to Gen AI and everything in between with industry leading performance and power efficiency.”
Expanding the SiMa.ai ONE Platform
The SiMa.ai ONE Platform for Edge AI is a software-centric framework, designed to ensure compatibility across the entire MLSoC range. This allows users to upgrade, transition, or mix-and-match components with ease, reducing total cost of ownership for edge AI adopters.
The first-generation MLSoC has established itself in performance and power efficiency, as validated by the March 2024 MLCommons MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0). This generation will continue to support CNN-based models across applications such as industrial inspection, retail, aerospace, defence, and smart vision (Ethernet-based cameras only).
With MLSoC Modalix, customers can accelerate deep learning, transformer, and Generative AI models, running advanced models like Llama2 7B at over 10 tokens per second. The chip features an integrated application processor, ISP, vision, and digital signal processors, along with innovations like BF16 hardware support, enabling all CNN and transformer models for language, vision, and speech to deliver near-fp32 accuracy at significantly lower costs and power consumption.
Generative AI applications on MLSoC Modalix will benefit from:
- SiMa.ai’s Palette software with a patented Compiler that ensures data layers are pre-fetched and available on time
- An enhanced Machine Learning Accelerator that runs DNNs and Large Multi-Modal Models at high performance while maintaining power efficiency
New hardware features
Key hardware features include:
- An integrated ISP module with support for 4 x 4 lanes of MIPI CSI 2, allowing connection to MIPI cameras and Ethernet-based cameras via 4 x 10G Ethernet ports
- Eight lanes of PCIe Gen 5, providing faster data ingress and egress
- Eight Arm Cortex-A65 dual-threaded CPUs, offering increased capability and flexibility for customers with specialised use cases, backed by Arm’s extensive software partner ecosystem
- Built using TSMC’s N6 technology, ensuring cutting-edge efficiency and performance
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