Breaking through soft and hard barriers, Xilinx releases Vitis unified software platform for developers

2019 year 10 month 9 Japan , China , Beijing —— Xilinx, a global leader in adaptive and Intelligent Computing （Xilinx, Inc.,（NASDAQ:XLNX）） Announced today Vitis（ Pronunciation is Vī-tis）— This is a unified software platform , It can include software engineers and AI The majority of developers, including scientists, can benefit from the flexibility of hardware .

▲ Tang Xiaolei, sales vice president of Xilinx Greater China, introduced Xilinx's transformation strategy from device to platform and industrial development trend Vitis Industry significance of the release .

▲ Luo Lin, senior manager of Xilinx software and artificial intelligence, introduced in detail Vitis Technical details 、 function 、 Resources and development route .

After five years 、 Total investment 1000 Built for personal years ,Vitis Unified software platform does not require users to master hardware expertise , It can automatically adapt and use the Xilinx hardware architecture according to the software or algorithm code . Besides ,Vitis The platform does not restrict the use of proprietary development environments , Instead, it can be inserted into general software development tools , And use a wealth of optimized open source libraries , So that developers can focus on the development of algorithms .Vitis Independent of Vivado Design Suite , The latter still continues to support users who want to program with hardware code . however ,Vitis It can also be achieved by encapsulating hardware modules into software callable functions , So as to improve the working efficiency of hardware developers .

President and CEO of Xilinx (CEO) Victor Peng Express ：“ As computing demand grows exponentially , Engineers and scientists are often limited by the performance of fixed chips . Xilinx has created an excellent design environment , So that programmers and engineers in various disciplines can use the tools and frameworks they are familiar with and master , Jointly develop and optimize their hardware and software . This means that they can adjust the hardware architecture according to their own applications , Instead of new chips .”

Vitis Unified software platform

VITIS Stack

Vitis The platform is built on a stack based architecture , The architecture can be seamlessly inserted into the open source standard development system and construction environment , And most importantly , It contains a rich set of standard libraries .

Vitis Stack

The foundation layer is Vitis Target platform . The platform consists of circuit board and pre programming I/O constitute . The second layer is called Vitis Core development suite , Cover the open source Xilinx runtime library , To manage data movement between different domains , Including subsystems 、 Upcoming Versal ACAP? Internal AI Engine and necessary external hosts . Besides , This layer also provides compilers 、 Core development tools such as analyzers and debuggers . Although Xilinx provides a world-class design environment , But these tools are designed to seamlessly integrate with industry standard build systems and development environments .

On the third floor ,8 individual Vitis Library provides 400 More than kinds of optimized open source applications . this 8 The two libraries are ：Vitis Basic linear algebra subroutines （BLAS） library 、Vitis Solver Library 、Vitis Safe house 、Vitis Visual Library 、Vitis Data compression library 、Vitis Measurement financial treasury 、Vitis Database sets and Vitis AI library . With these libraries , Software developers can use standard application programming interfaces （API） To achieve hardware acceleration .

VITIS AI And domain specific architectures

Vitis Platform 4 layer , The most transformative layer is Vitis AI. It integrates domain specific architectures （DSA）.DSA For AI Hardware implementation of the model , Developers can use, including TensorFlow and Caffe And other industry-leading frameworks to configure and program it .Vitis AI The tool chain provided can be optimized in a few minutes 、 Quantization and compilation operations , Run pre trained on Xilinx devices efficiently AI Model . Besides , It also provides dedicated services for deployment from the edge to the cloud API, Achieve industry-class inference performance and efficiency . Salins will soon launch another DSA（Vitis Video）, Support from the FFmpeg Directly encode and provide the same super simple and powerful end-to-end video solution . Provided by the partner company DSA Include ： And GATK Integrated for gene analysis Illumina, And ElasticSearch Integrated for big data analysis BlackLynx, As well as the proprietary currently used by our customers DSA.

VITIS Developer site

today , Xilinx also announced the launch of a developer website , It is convenient for developers to obtain examples 、 Tutorials and documentation , At the same time as a connection Vitis Space in the developer community . It will be composed of thalinx and Vitis Experts and enthusiasts jointly manage , And will provide Vitis The latest updates about 、 Valuable information for tips and tricks .