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[Caayn]

At Hot Chips in Cupertino, California Microsoft unveiled the hardware that's powering their Hololens.

The secretive HPU is a custom-designed TSMC-fabricated 28nm coprocessor that has 24 Tensilica DSP cores. It has about 65 million logic gates, 8MB of SRAM, and a layer of 1GB of low-power DDR3 RAM on top, all in a 12mm-by-12mm BGA package. We understand it can perform a trillion calculations a second.

The unit sits alongside a 14nm Intel Atom x86 Cherry Trail system-on-chip, which has its own 1GB of RAM and runs Windows 10 and apps that take advantage of the immersive noggin-fitted display.

The HPU draws less than 10W and includes PCIe and standard serial interfaces. Microsoft took advantage of Tensilica's instruction extensions to add 10 custom instructions to the DSPs in order to speed up specific operations needed by the HoloLens to render realtime augmented reality. Overall, the unit is capable of accelerating algorithms to 200 times faster than when in pure software.

Souce Slides aren't made publicly available yet.

 

[wesleyshark]

Impressive