Imagination, Baidu Release an Open Source AI Model Zoo for Edge Chip Designers

Imagination Technologies, in collaboration with long-time partner Baidu, has announced launch an open source machine learning Model Zoo library, built atop the PaddlePaddle framework and aiming to offer chip designers easier access to artificial intelligence processing functions.

"[Baidu's] PaddlePaddle is a long-time partner of Imagination, and we share a common vision for the future," Imagination China chair Wallace Pai explains. "We want to ensure that developers and manufacturers have access to the right tools for AI innovation. Our co-created AI ecosystem will continue to leverage our advanced capabilities in AI computing, enabling more support for software and SoC creators in the industry."

"As a leading supplier of processing technology and IP, Imagination enabled Baidu Paddle to construct a highly efficient and flexible software stack solution," adds Baudi's Yanjun Ma. "The solution is developed based on the deep learning open source PaddlePaddle framework and Imagination's heterogeneous computing IP through co-designing and optimization. The collaboration will expand to other areas including data center, consumer and RISC-V."

The jointly-developed open source library covers a range of AI processing workloads, from image classification and segmentation to object detection, designed to run on hardware built using Imagination's intellectual properties — including its PowerVR graphics processor family and its range of Neural Network Accelerator (NNA) coprocessors. At launch, however, the library has only been tested on UNISOC's ROC1.

"[The] PaddlePaddle engine and PowerVR compute runtime could be regarded as different inference backend[s]," note the library's authors. "They share the same preprocessing and post-processing. PaddlePaddle engine runs non-quantized models, whereas PowerVR runtime runs quantized models."

The companies have released the Model Zoo under the permissive Apache 2.0 on GitHub, and plan to run a practical workshop on the 28th of September — though, at the time of writing, the workshop was only being offered in Chinese.