SUMMARY
Axelera AI is delivering the world’s most powerful and advanced solutions for AI at the Edge. Its industry-defining Metis® AI platform – a complete hardware and software solution for AI inference at the edge – makes computer vision applications more accessible, powerful and user friendly than ever before. Based in the AI Innovation Center of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Axelera AI has R&D offices in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and the UK, with over 200 employees in 17 countries. Its team of experts in AI software and hardware come from top AI firms and Fortune 500 companies.
PROBLEM
Inference is bringing advanced analytics and intelligence to data, and thanks to the Axelera AI platform, that can now happen wherever the data is created. The data could be images, video, speech, or even sensors monitoring machine conditions.
The applications span nearly every industry: retail operations using computer vision for shelf management and checkout verification; industrial facilities running predictive maintenance and defect detection to cut downtime and error rates; healthcare systems accelerating record management and radiology analysis to free up scarce expert time for patient care.
All of these use cases have a few things in common: latency matters, privacy is important, and cost of deployment is a factor. Axelera AI platforms address all three.
SOLUTION
Axelera AI has dedicated the company to optimizing inference compute and brought together the top talent in Digital In-Memory-Computing. This novel computing paradigm is used to perform the most demanding workload for Artificial Intelligence applications - called MVM (Matrix-Vector Multiplication) and representing 80% of the overall compute resources used for AI inference - directly in the memory cell. The reduced data movement translates into orders of magnitude of improved efficiency (performance/watt consumption) compared to CPU and GPU architectures.
The Axelera AI team also has state-of-the-art capabilities around RISC-V and dataflow architectures, to provide the most powerful accelerator currently available in the market. By focusing all of our technical decisions on how to best perform inference calculations, we were able to ensure the most powerful, efficient and cost-effective platform available.
The company’s first-generation AI Processing Unit (AIPU), Metis, can deliver 2-5x higher throughput than competitors, and up to 5x more efficiency than offerings from market leaders. Paired with the easy-to-use Voyager SDK, the Axelera AI platform allows for software companies, end users and hardware developers alike to build inference-optimized solutions that scale across industries and use cases.