Analog-AI pioneer Mythic has made progress on its first chip, which is rated at 35 trillion operations per second (TOPS) with an impressive power efficiency of 6 TOPS per watt. The M1108 chip stores up to 113 million weights in its 108 cores, which integrate the company’s unique analog compute engine. The Austin-based startup has been sampling initial silicon and expects to begin production in 2H21.

The chip targets the high-performance edge-AI market. Instead of the mainstream video typical of surveillance cameras, it’s better suited to midrange and high-end cameras that have 4K sensors or run multiple models. The chip can also power on-premises servers that handle several cameras, such as in a retail deployment. It can tackle certain industrial machine-vision applications and even high-end drones as well.

Although the M1108 provides a complete inference accelerator, it lacks a host CPU and system I/O. It’s therefore easy to add to an existing design, but it’s less integrated than AI-enabled SoCs. The M1108 comes in four versions: the standalone chip, two M.2 modules, and a PCIe evaluation board. All four products feature a single chip, although the company is developing future products that contain multiple chips. Mythic announced that its design can inference ResNet-50 at 870fps while consuming 4W; it withheld the TDP, which we estimate at 6W.