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HoloLens-Feature

Ever since Microsoft appear HoloLens, the company has kept its presentations and information on the mixed-reality glasses and ecosystem isolated as more of a developer curiosity than a mass market product. In that location'south good reason for the company to have done so; look at how easily Google Unwanted Face Computer Drinking glass was hijacked by the hipster grade with delusions of self-entitlement. But it's also made it harder to track improvements to the technology that underlies HoloLens, including Microsoft'south Holographic Processing Unit, or HPU.

Harry Shum, executive VP of Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Resource Grouping, announced at the 2017 Briefing on Computer Vision and Design Recognition that instead of relying on FPGAs to provide price- and power-effective execution of AI programs and to form deep neural networks (DNNs), Microsoft'due south 2nd-generation HPU two.0 volition incorporate a custom silicon AI coprocessor for paradigm and speech recognition.

"The scrap supports a wide variety of layer types, fully programmable by us," Mark Pollefey, Microsoft's director of science for HoloLens, wrote in a company blog post. "Harry showed an early spin of the 2d version of the HPU running live code implementing hand segmentation."

Pollefrey goes on to say:

The AI coprocessor is designed to work in the side by side version of HoloLens, running continuously, off the HoloLens battery. This is but i case of the new capabilities we are developing for HoloLens, and is the kind of thing you can do when you have the willingness and capacity to invest for the long term, every bit Microsoft has done throughout its history. And this is the kind of thinking you need if you're going to develop mixed reality devices that are themselves intelligent. Mixed reality and artificial intelligence stand for the future of computing, and we're excited to be advancing this borderland.

What we know about HoloLens 1.0 and its associated HPU is that the system integrates accelerometer information, a Kinect-like depth camera, and a set of 24 custom Tensilica DSP cores. The first HoloLens was congenital around an Cantlet processor based on the Cherry Trail platform.

Microsoft hasn't indicated who it will turn to for mainstream CPU performance now that Cantlet is effectively expressionless. Intel'southward few Atom-class parts that however survive are intended for low-end laptops and desktops, not the ultra-mobile power envelopes that this next-generation HoloLens volition demand to hit.

Whether that means MS thinks it found enough power savings elsewhere in the blueprint and its other components to continue using Ruby-red Trail or that information technology plans to switch to an ARM processor for HoloLens remains to be seen. AMD is unlikely to exist in the running here. Despite Ryzen's tremendous success, AMD doesn't make any newer parts that would fit into HoloLens' required TDP.