GrAI Matter Labs has won the start-up award at the Vision trade fair in Stuttgart.
The company is releasing an AI processor that it says is 20 times more efficient in terms of inferences per second per Watt than a Google Edge TPU or an Nvidia Jetson NX.
In his pitch to the judges, Christian Verbrugge, the firm’s senior director of business development Europe, said he wants Europe to be stronger in terms of AI.
He noted that there are 32 companies making AI chips in China, 64 in the US, but only nine in Europe. He said that there needs to be developments in hardware to sustain all the work going on in software for AI.
GrAI Matter Labs’s Life-Ready AI chip is a vision inference processor, which lowers energy consumption by only processing changes happening in the images rather than every single pixel. In this way it can optimise the compute inside the network.
The sparsity-driven AI system-on-chip delivers Resnet-50 inferences at 1ms speed.
Both this technology and Prophesee’s neuromorphic sensor, which won the Vision Award, can be thought of as bio-inspired, although Verbrugge said the chip is not the same as an event-based sensor.
Framos has partnered with GrAI Matter Labs to build a 3D imaging platform, combining GrAI Matter Labs’ chip with Framos’s D435e depth camera. Adlink has also collaborated to release a Life-Ready AI SMARC platform based on Adlink’s SMARC I-Pi development kits.
GrAI Matter Labs is currently taking orders for the processor, which Verbrugge said will be commercially available next year.
The company is also developing what Verbrugge called an ‘AI curriculum’ for teachers and students in French universities.
