Quadric prototype
Today chip startup Quadric.io announced plans to build the world’s first “supercomputer” specifically designed for the real-time needs of autonomous systems. Now funded with a fresh $15 Million in funding, Quadric’s technology is designed specifically for high performance, low power edge computing.
Instead of building a heterogeneous system with CPUs/GPUs/FPGAs & AI chips and dealing with that complexity of software and hardware integration, Quadric has the technology to handle most of the application in a single unified hardware architecture and software model,” said Hideki Sugimoto from DENSO. “The integrated approach achieves better latencies that improves safety of automotive ADAS implementations.”
Co-founded by three experienced technologists with prior start-up exits, Quadric.io has completely rearchitected the full stack — going from silicon to software — to meet the unique needs of computing on the edge. Quadric’s technology enables both high performance computing and artificial intelligence in a single unified architecture. Built around the Quadric Processor, Quadric’s supercomputer is plug-and-play, enabling innovators to plug in their sensor set and build their entire application to support near-instantaneous decision making. Early testing of Quadric’s system has shown up to 100x lower latency and a 90% reduction in power consumption.
While advancements in edge supercomputing have increased in recent years, developers still lack a unified product architecture that offers reconfigurability, generality, and scalability. To bring the power and performance of server-class hardware to the resource-constrained edge, Quadric’s team built the world’s first and only purpose-built platform for low latency edge computing. Our Supercomputer enables the deployment of tomorrow’s algorithms today, whereby developers can customize their code, then deploy them with popular libraries and frameworks such as OpenCV, Tensorflow, and C++. Reconfigurability and broad support for artificial intelligence, as well as high-performance computing, gives the developer freedom to push the algorithmic envelope without compromising performance.
The funding round is led by strategic investor DENSO Group, a tier 1 automotive company, who will also be one of Quadric’s customers for future electronic systems in all levels of autonomous driving solutions.
We’re developers ourselves and have seen the shortcomings of existing technologies for real-time edge computing — we’re building the Quadric platform to address this and unlock new capabilities that will accelerate development of autonomous systems,” said Veerbhan Kheterpal, CEO and co-founder of Quadric.io. “Quadric is the next step in the virtuous cycle of better platforms enabling better algorithms, leading to better app engagement that in turn drives better innovation.”
