Beijing, China, March 25, 2020 – Avnet Asia, the world’s leading technology solutions provider and Mipsology, an AI software innovator, today announced that Avnet will market and sell Mipsology’s Zebra software platform to its Asia Pacific customers. Zebra removes the technical complexity of FPGAs, making them plug-and-play, blazing-fast and high-performance. The agreement expands Avnet’s IoT ecosystem, bringing Mipsology’s breakthrough deep learning inference acceleration solution to Avnet’s Asian customers. Businesses looking to deploy AI can now seamlessly migrate to the new FPGA-based acceleration technology without code changes. Also, its software and hardware have a much longer lifespan than GPU-based solutions.

Avnet’s first product to use the solution will be the Zebra-based Xilinx Alveo data center accelerator card. The range of future products is expected to expand. In addition to distributing the solution, Avnet offers a comprehensive suite of services including hardware, software, system integration, application development, design chain and technical expertise to customers looking to deploy machine learning in the data center.

Compared to GPUs, FPGAs are more suitable for decision-making (inference) acceleration for large-scale industrial AI applications, including video surveillance, smart cities, and autonomous vehicles. However, FPGA programming requires a lot of expertise and skills, and its hardware designers are in short supply. Zebra eliminates the requirement for FPGA expertise, making it as easy to use as CPU/GPU for inference acceleration for deep learning. Running neural networks defined by TensorFlow, PyTorch, Caffe, and other frameworks on FPGAs typically requires a lot of manual tuning time and effort, but Zebra makes it fast and easy.

“Avnet is committed to driving IoT innovation, simplifying IoT complexity, and helping enterprises deploy complete solutions faster. Avnet’s comprehensive design services are combined with Alveo’s best-in-class FPGAs. The combination of the accelerator card and Mipsology’s Zebra technology provides our customers with a low-cost, high-performance, and long-life AI neural network inference solution.”

Zebra significantly speeds up computation in the inference phase, reducing latency and improving the performance of machine learning applications. It enables faster computation of any neural network, often with lower power consumption and lower cost.

Ludovic Larzul, founder and CEO of Mipsology, said: “We are delighted that Avnet will bring Zebra to its large APAC customer base. Zebra has been adopted by many users and has proven effective in enabling true AI applications. , which reduces the deployment risk by directly transforming the trained network into manual deployment by users. We hope this solution can not only help Avnet’s customers in the data center field, but also help industrial AI applications, including video surveillance/analysis, transportation Transportation, robotics, satellites and smart cities, etc.”