Imagination Technologies announces that developers working with TensorFlow will be able to target PowerVR GPUs directly thanks to newly optimised open source SYCL neural network libraries. The SYCL version of TensorFlow supports a very large number of AI operations and is easily user-customizable, meaning that developers using the latest neural networks, or researching their own AI technologies, can run those networks out-of-the-box with high performance on PowerVR. Because TensorFlow SYCL support is both open source and open standards-based, it’s an ideal solution for developers who want to accelerate the latest AI technologies on low-power devices. SYCL builds on the concepts and efficiency of Khronos OpenCL. The PowerVR-optimised SYCL libraries – SYCL-DNN, SYCL-BLAS and Eigen – will be available on GitHub. A TensorFlow fork containing extended SYCL support is available from Codeplay’s GitHub.

The Khronos Group announces a significant expansion in the ecosystem for the NNEF (Neural Network Exchange Format) open, royalty-free standard that enables hardware manufacturers to reliably exchange trained neural networks between training frameworks and inference engines. New and improved NNEF open source convertors, including for TensorFlow Lite and ONNX, enables NNEF to be used to carry trained frameworks from a wider range of training frameworks. A set of extensions to the NNEF 1.0 specification enables NNEF files to contain richer networks of operations and topologies. Finally, an openly available NNEF Model Zoo enables inferencing engines to test their reliable import of NNEF models. More information on NNEF can be found at the Home Page.