Mipsology announced that its Zebra AI inference accelerator achieved the highest efficiency based on the latest MLPerf inference benchmarking. Per the company, the Zebra on a Xilinx Alveo U250 accelerator card achieved more than 2x higher peak performance efficiency compared to all other commercial accelerators.
Peak TOPS have been the standard for measuring computation performance potential, many assume that more TOPS equal higher performance. However, this fails to take into consideration the real efficiency of the architecture, and the fact that at some point there are diminishing returns. This achievement, similar to “dark silicon” for power, occurs when the circuitry can not be used because of existing limitations. Zebra has proven to scale along with TOPS, maintaining the same high efficiency while peak TOPS are growing.
