Breaking through the barriers between software and hardware, unlocking innovation for all employees - Xilinx grandly releases Vitis unified software platform
Today, Maria Tang, Vice President of Sales for Greater China at Xilinx, and Andy Luo, Senior Manager of Software and Artificial Intelligence at Xilinx, launched the milestone Vitis™ unified software platform in Beijing. With the theme of "Breaking through the barriers between software and hardware to unlock innovation for all employees", the platform marks a new chapter in which Xilinx will unlock the hardware acceleration barriers for software developers through software innovation and bring Xilinx's unique adaptive computing capabilities to all developers.
Figure: Tang Xiaolei introduced the industry significance of the release of Vitis through Xilinx's transformation strategy from devices to platforms and industry development trends.
【Vitis】This is a unified software platform that allows a wide range of developers, including software engineers and AI scientists, to benefit from the advantages of hardware flexibility.
The Vitis unified software platform, which took five years and a total of 1,000 man-years to build, can automatically adapt and use Xilinx hardware architecture based on software or algorithm code without requiring users to have in-depth hardware expertise. In addition, the
Vitis platform is not restricted to the use of proprietary development environments
, but can be integrated into common software development tools and leverage a rich set of optimized open source libraries, allowing developers to focus on algorithm development.
Vitis is independent of the Vivado™ Design Suite, which continues to support users who want to program in hardware code. However, Vitis can also improve the productivity of hardware developers by encapsulating hardware modules as software-callable functions.
As computing demands grow exponentially, engineers and scientists are often limited by fixed chip performance. Xilinx has created an excellent design environment that enables programmers and engineers from all disciplines to use the tools and frameworks they already know and master to jointly develop and optimize their hardware and software. This means they can adjust the hardware architecture according to their applications without the need for new chips.
--Victor Peng , President and CEO of Xilinx
| Vitis Unified Software Platform |
Vitis Stack
The Vitis platform is built on a stack-based architecture that plugs seamlessly into open source standard development systems and build environments, and most importantly, includes a rich set of standard libraries.
The base layer is the Vitis target platform. This platform consists of a circuit board and pre-programmed I/O. The second layer is called the Vitis Core Development Kit, which covers the open source Xilinx runtime library to manage data movement between different domains, including subsystems, the AI engine in the upcoming Versal ACAP™, and necessary external hosts. In addition, this layer also provides core development tools such as compilers, analyzers, and debuggers. Although Xilinx provides a world-class design environment, these tools are designed to integrate seamlessly with industry-standard build systems and development environments.
At the third level, eight Vitis libraries provide more than 400 optimized open source applications. These eight libraries are: Vitis Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (BLAS) Library, Vitis Solver Library, Vitis Security Library, Vitis Vision Library, Vitis Data Compression Library, Vitis Quantitative Finance Library, Vitis Database Set, and Vitis AI Library. With these libraries, software developers can use standard application programming interfaces (APIs) to achieve hardware acceleration.
Vitis AI and Domain-Specific Architectures
The fourth and most transformative layer of the Vitis platform is Vitis AI. It integrates a domain-specific architecture (DSA). DSA provides hardware implementations for AI models that developers can configure and program using industry-leading frameworks including TensorFlow and Caffe. Vitis AI provides a toolchain that can optimize, quantize, and compile in minutes to efficiently run pre-trained AI models on Xilinx devices. In addition, it also provides dedicated APIs for deployment from edge to cloud, achieving industry-leading inference performance and efficiency. Xilinx will soon launch another DSA (Vitis Video) that supports direct encoding from FFmpeg and provides the same super simple and powerful end-to-end video solution. DSAs provided by partner companies include: Illumina integrated with GATK for genetic analysis, BlackLynx integrated with ElasticSearch for big data analysis, and proprietary DSAs currently used by our customers.
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