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Goya µarch
General Info
Arch Type	NPU
Designer	Habana
Manufacturer	TSMC
Introduction	2018
Process	16 nm
PE Configs	8
Contemporary
Gaudi

Goya Logo

Goya is a 16-nanometer microarchitecture for inference neural processors designed by Habana Labs.

Process Technology

Goya-based processors are fabricated on TSMC 16-nanometer process.

Architecture

Block Diagram

Overview

Goya is designed as a microarchitecture for the acceleration of inference. Since the target market is the data center, the thermal design point for those chips was relatively high - at around 200 W. Goya relies on PCIe 4.0 to interface to a host processor. Habana's software compiles the models and associated instructions into independent recipes which can then be sent to the accelerator for execution. The design itself uses a heterogenous approach comprising of a large General Matrix Multiply (GMM) engine, Tensor Processor Cores (TPCs), and a large shared memory pool.

Tensor Processor Cores (TPC)

HL-100/102 PCIe Card

There are eight TPCs. Each TPC also incorporates its own local memory but omits caches. The on-die caches and memory can be either hardware-managed or fully software-managed, allowing the compiler to optimize the residency of data and reducing movement. Each of the individual TPCs is a VLIW DSP design that has been optimized for AI applications. This includes AI-specific instructions and operations. The TPCs are designed for flexibility and can be programmed in plain C. The TPC supports mixed-prevision operations including 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit SIMD vector operations for both integer and floating-point. This was done in order to allow accuracy loss tolerance to be controlled on a per-model design by the programmer. Goya offers both coarse-grained precision control and fine-grained down to the tensor level.

Bibliography

• Habana, IEEE Hot Chips 31 Symposium (HCS) 2019.
• Habana, AI Hardware Summit 2019
• Habana, Linley Fall Processor Conference 2019

See also

• Gaudi
• HL series