SK Telecom claims 5x greater performance over GPUs as it deploys Xilinx FPGAs for AI acceleration
SK Telecom’s NUGU
and NUGU mini device, the world’s
first Korean language-based portable
artificial intelligence (AI) speakers.
SKT has deployed Xilinx FPGAs as their Artificial Intelligence (AI) accelerators in its data centre, according to a joint announcement from the companies.
The Xilinx Kintex UltraScale FPGAs are now running SKT’s automatic speech-recognition (ASR) application to accelerate NUGU, its voice-activated assistant.
SKT achieved up to five times higher performance in ASR applications when compared to GPUs, and more importantly, 16 times better performance-per-watt. This is the first commercial adoption of FPGA accelerators in the AI domain for large-scale data centres in South Korea.
The FPGA-based accelerator lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) of ASR application servers by populating existing CPU-only servers with efficient Xilinx FPGA add-in cards. The ASR servers easily and simply accelerate multiple voice service channels with Xilinx FPGA cards in their empty slots. One FPGA card provides more than five times the performance of a single server, resulting in substantial cost savings. This performance and TCO advantage benefits SK Telecom and its customers.
“Over many years we have seen the shape of the industry evolve, and we are proud to be at the forefront of developing AI accelerators. By designing our solution based on the Xilinx KCU1500 board and our own bitstream image, we have developed a cost-effective, high-performance application,” said Kang-Won Lee, senior vice president, software research and development centre at SKT.
In the first quarter of 2018,
NUGU’s MAU (Monthly Active User)
surpassed 3 million – the largest in the country
– and the number of AI service areas
is also expanding rapidly
The adaptive nature of Xilinx FPGAs enables fast deployment of custom hardware accelerators for the rapidly evolving field of AI and deep learning. Moreover, FPGAs provide higher performance and lower latency at lower power when compared to CPUs and GPUs. SK Telecom joins a fast-growing list of high-profile commercial data centres that have deployed FPGAs for compute acceleration.
“We are delighted to have the opportunity to deploy Xilinx FPGAs to SKT’s AI data centre, a first in South Korea,” said Manish Muthal, vice president, marketing for data centre at Xilinx. “Xilinx Kintex UltraScale KCU1500 FPGAs show that Xilinx has a major competitive edge in applications. Xilinx will continue to focus its technological capabilities and innovations on data centre acceleration.”
SKT plans to demonstrate its FPGA-based AI solution at the Xilinx Developer Forum (XDF) being held in Silicon Valley on October 1-2, and in Beijing on October 16.
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