In our interview with Charles Macfarlane, VP of Marketing at Codeplay, one sentiment in particular became very apparent: “open standards is the way to [go].” As more industries start to use tech, like with the automotive industry dipping its toes into new and advanced programming methods for computer vision and machine learning, Codeplay is attempting to instill an open standards mentality within these traditionally less open industries. With Macfarlane, we tried to see how Codeplay plans to do just that. #automagic
If you don’t know, Codeplay brings middleware software into a lot of different processors, lately AI chips. “As we go into artificial intelligence, we’re talking about a different breed of processors coming out, neural network processors, that we enable with this layer called OpenCL. On top of that, you’ve got SYCL which is very much off-the-shelf C++,” explained Macfarlane.
One example is Google’s TensorFlow deep learning framework that Codeplay has brought to an OpenCL-enabled processor system in a full, reliable and efficient way.
Open is the keyword here, as we realized the more we talked with Macfarlane: “We connect AI to Silicon, so you can easily connect machine learning applications to almost anybody else’s processors. The developer can easily take it and deploy it onto different platforms without special optimization,” he reinforced.
Indeed, the freedom to read, adopt, implement, and extend a standard is the norm in the gaming and mobile industries. The automotive industry, unfortunately, has been slower in giving up their proprietary and traditional implementations.
That’s about to change if Macfarlane and Codeplay have their way. Codeplay prides itself in being the first and only company to bring open standards to automotive as well, and in doing so, accelerate ADAS (advanced driver-assistance systems) technology, “which will continue [to be vital] all the way through autonomous vehicle”.
In fact, they’re expecting a huge demand for this in the months and years to come, since open standards make it faster and easier to get applications out there and without a lot of training resources: “Traditionally, [the process in the automotive industry] has been very optimized and had very proprietary implementation. The way things are going, […] open standards is the way to do it”
With Codeplay’s advancements, we can definitely see them bringing a productive open standards mentality to the car industry.
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