Revision as of 15:33, 11 March 2018

Streaming Hybrid Architecture Vector Engine v2.0 (SHAVE v2.0) is an accelerator microarchitecture designed by Movidius for their vision processors. SHAVE is incorporated into Movidius Myriad family of vision processors.

History

The original SHAVE architecture was designed primarily for the acceleration of game physics. Low demand for expensive physics acceleration in smartphones has forced to re-focused on image and vision processing. Their architecture was versatile enough that it allowed for fairly simple modification to target machine vision processing.

Process Technology

Main article: 65 nm lithography process

This microarchitecture was designed for TSMC's 65 nm process.

Architecture

• Hybrid RISC-DSP-GPU VLIW architecture
• 20 GFLOPS computational power
  • At 300 mW
• Predicated execution
• Branch delay slots
• Tailored to streaming workloads
• 128-bit vector arithmetic
  • 8/16/32-bit integer
  • 16/32-bit floating point
• Full support for sparse data structures (matrix/array, random access)

Instruction Set

SHAVE supports a mixture of many different types of instructions belonging to a number of different classes of architectures.

• RISC style
  • Instruction predication
  • Large set of integer operations
• VLIW style
  • Parallel functional units controlled by VLIW instructions
  • 8/16/32-bit x 1-4 SIMD int
• DSP style
  • Zero overhead looping
  • Modulo addressing
  • Transparent DMA modes
  • FFT, Viterbi, etc..
  • Parallel comparisons
• GPU style
  • Streaming operations
  • 16/32-bit FP operations
  • Texture management unit

Block Diagram

Entire SoC

Individual Core