Nick Ni - Director of Product Marketing, AI and Software - Xilinx

Title: Vitis AI: TensorFlow to FPGAs from edge to cloud

Abstract: AI scientists are moving from research (training) using high price, high power, large form factor HPCs to productization (inference). AI inference requires orders of magnitude more horsepower while keeping the price, power, latency, form factor intact, Xilinx adaptable devices are ideal for that. However, the biggest challenge has been the programming model where it required developers to be hardware savvy. In this talk, we will introduce the newly released development environment called Vitis AI, which allows users to directly take their TensorFlow trained models and target Xilinx devices from edge to cloud. Vitis AI consists of a suite of familiar tools for AI scientists: quantizer, pruner, compiler, profiler, runtime, and pre-optimized Deep Learning Processing Units (DPU).

Keywords: ML toolkit, FPGA, DPU

Bio: Nick Ni is the director of product marketing, AI and software at Xilinx. His team’s responsibilities include business development, go-to-market plans, ecosystem development, and outbound marketing for Xilinx’s artificial intelligence products and software/hardware development tools. Ni joined Xilinx in 2014. Before Xilinx, he held multiple roles in R&D and applications at ATI, AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel, focusing on embedded systems design and high-level synthesis. Ni earned a master’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto and holds over 10 patents and publications.