On March 19, 2018, IBM "think 2018" and "OpenPOWER Summit 2018" were held in Las Vegas, US. ThinkForce was invited to participate in this great event together with other famous OpenPOWER ecological partners, such as Inspur, Wistron, Mellanox and etc. Mr. Liming CHEN, chairman of IBM Greater China and other senior IBM China management team welcomed and appreciated ThinkForce's active participation.

ThinkForcewe demoed the prototype of its nerual network inference acceleration kernel ManyCore^TM in the  techtorials. As ThinkForce’s key technology, ManyCore^TM uses data flow processing design without any instruction set. It can accelerate convolution, activation and pooling operations which are commonly used in NN inference, and support the combination of them. The external control unit can configure the kernel through asynchronous macro operation instructions. 

For operation efficiency of the kernel, ThinkForce has developed a  software toolkit named TFDL^TM. It enables AI algorithm companies to quickly complete hardware deployment of their trained floating point neural networks almost losslessly. The HW+SW joint solution can efficiently accelerate the calculation of various complex and cascaded hybrid neural networks, and minimize user's software learning cost, thus shortening products' time to market.

With 128 MACs running at 500MHz clock, the prototype processed real-time human face detection for 6 HD video stream inputs simultaneously. 

Mr. Zhenning ZHANG, VP marketing of ThinkForce, also introduced the product specification of NNC-200V inference accelerator which will be launched later. The core of NNC-200V card is ThinkForce self developed ASIC chip. Based on team's outstanding architecture design and integrated circuit layout capability, the performance of the ASIC will be tens-fold as good as the current FPGA demo. The chip will also integrate a video decoder to deal with the real-time analysis of digital video stream. NNC-200V series cards can support the face recognition and object classification for dozens of full HD video streams within a single PCI-E card. The power efficiency ratio will also be better than the mainstream similar products on the market. It is an ideal choice for cloud inference operation of IP video streams in security and retail industries.

As one of global leading server vendors, Inspur showed its POWER Platform AI solution with ThinkForce’s technology inside. Mr. Nan WU, deputy general manager of ecological cooperation at Inspur, said: "we appreciate ThinkForce's strong technology in the field of AI computing. We look forward to working with ThinkForce and many other OpenPOWER eco partners to build a broad AI cloud computing market in vertical industries".