ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group

ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group - meeting #14

Source: ROS Discourse, January 31, 2023 [1]
We reviewed the progress made over 2022, reported on the current status of the group activities, and discussed our goals for 2023. We also touched on the strategic projects spearheaded by the Working Group including RobotPerf, Robotics MCU (robo-v-mcu) and the Robotics Processing Unit (RPU).

News

What slowdown? - December 2022 robotics investments reaches $1.14B

Source: Robotics Business Review, February 1, 2023 [2]
December 2022’s 55 robotics investments totaled US $1.14B, a 7.7% increase over December 2021’s funding total. Investment into companies providing robotics solutions for autonomous ground transportation such as sensors, autonomy ‘stacks’ and ‘drivers’, and whole cloth systems, was particularly strong.

India and UAE need to form a strategic alliance over robotics

Source: Firstpost, January 30, 2023 [3]
India and UAE’s synergy in the field of technology, AI, robotics and manufacturing is mind-boggling. Both countries are well poised to work as brothers and friends, on equal terms.

AMD reports fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results

Source: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., January 31, 2023 [4]
AMD announced revenue for the fourth quarter of 2022 of $5.6 billion, gross margin of 43%, operating loss of $149 million, net income of $21 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.01. For full year 2022, the company reported revenue of $23.6bn, gross Margin was 52%, operating income was $6.3bn, net profit was $1.3b, and earnings per share was $3.50.

Intel reports fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 financial results

Source: HPCwire, January 26, 2023 [5]
Intel Corporation today reported fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 financial results. Fourth-quarter revenue was $14.0 billion, down 32 percent year-over-year (YoY) and 28 percent YoY on a non-GAAP basis. Forecasting first-quarter 2023 revenue of $10.5 billion to $11.5bn, with EPS forecast of $0.80-$0.15.

Intel® Agilex™ 5 FPGA D-series: Performance and power-efficiency

Source: Intel [6]
Manufactured using Intel 7 technology and delivering 2X better performance-per-watt vs. 7 nm node competitors1, D-Series devices deliver high performance, low power, and small form factors for midrange FPGA applications.

After less than half a year, Intel quietly kills RISC-V dev environment

Source: The Register, January 30, 2023 [7]
Intel has shut down its RISC-V Pathfinder initiative less than six months after launching it. Intel billed the service as "scalable from individual users in academia and research, all the way to large-scale commercial projects". Pathfinder was launched in August 2022.

Automotive industry is driving revenue for at least one chip company: STMicroelectronics

Source: The Register, January 26, 2023 [8]
STMicroelectronics delivers revenues towards the upper end of guidance, driven by demand from automotive and industrial segments. The Swiss-based company saw net revenue for Q4 2022 of $4.42 billion, up 24.4 percent over the same period last year.

Intel® Agilex™ 5 FPGAs and SoC FPGAs are ideal for midrange applications requiring higher performance, lower power, and smaller form factors

Source: Intel [9]
Data is inundating infrastructure at every critical point from edge to core to data center. In 2019, Intel introduced the Intel Agilex™ 7 FPGAs and SoC FPGA to service the extreme capacity and performance requirements of the network core and data centers.

Papers

Vitruvius+: An area-efficient RISC-V decoupled vector coprocessor for high performance computing applications

Source: ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization, December 9, 2022 [10]
Vitruvius+ is a vector processing acceleration engine that represents the core of vector instruction execution in the HPC challenge. It implements the RISC-V vector extension (RVV) 0.7.1 and can be easily connected to a scalar core using the Open Vector Interface (OVI) standard.

Maplab 2.0 -- A modular and multi-modal mapping framework

Source: arXiv, December 1, 2022 [11]
Maplab 2.0 is a versatile open-source platform that facilitates developing, testing, and integrating new modules and features into a fully-fledged SLAM system. It's accuracy is comparable to the state-of-the-art on the HILTI 2021 benchmark.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. https://discourse.ros.org/t/hardware-acceleration-wg-meeting-14/29265/3 ↩︎

  2. Kara, D. (2023, February 1). What slowdown? - December 2022 robotics investments reaches $1.14B. Robotics Business Review. https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/manufacturing/december-2022-robotics-investments-reaches-1-14b/ ↩︎

  3. Gidwani, N. (2023, January 30). Opinion: India and UAE need to form a strategic alliance over robotics. Firstpost. https://www.firstpost.com/world/opinion-india-and-uae-need-to-form-a-strategic-alliance-over-robotics-12071092.html ↩︎

  4. AMD reports fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results. (2023, January 31). Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1115/amd-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2022-financial ↩︎

  5. Intel reports fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 financial results. (2023, January 26). HPCwire. https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/intel-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2022-financial-results/ ↩︎

  6. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/programmable/agilex-5-d-series-fpga.html ↩︎

  7. Sharwood, S. (2023, January 30). Intel quietly kills its RISC-V development environment. The Register: Enterprise Technology News and Analysis. https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/30/intel_ris_v_pathfinder_discontinued/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=article ↩︎

  8. Robinson, D. (2023, January 26). STMicroelectronics Q4 revenue up, expects growth in 2023. The Register: Enterprise Technology News and Analysis. https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/26/stmicroelectronics_q4_2022/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=article ↩︎

  9. Intel® Agilex™ 5 FPGAs and SoC FPGAs are ideal for midrange applications requiring higher performance, lower power, and smaller form factors. (n.d.). Intel | Data Center Solutions, IoT, and PC Innovation. https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/central-libraries/us/en/documents/2022-11/agilex-5-fpga-whitepaper.pdf ↩︎

  10. Minervini, F., Palomar, O., Unsal, O., Reggiani, E., Quiroga, J., Miramon, J., Rojas, C., Figueras, R., Ruiz, A., Gonzalez, A., Mendoza, J., Vargas, I., Hernandez, C., Cabre, J., Khoirunisya, L., Bouhali, M., Pavon, J., Moll, F., Olivieri, M., … Cristal, A. (2022, December 9). Vitruvius+: An area-efficient RISC-V decoupled vector coprocessor for high performance computing applications. ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3575861 ↩︎

  11. Cramariuc, A., Bernreiter, L., Tschopp, F., Fehr, M., Reijgwart, V., Nieto, J., Siegwart, R., & Cadena, C. (2022, December 1). Maplab 2.0 -- A modular and multi-modal mapping framework. arXiv.org. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.00654 ↩︎