Last October EDACafe reported about the introduction of Vitis, the new Xilinx unified software platform that enables the development of embedded software and accelerated applications on heterogeneous Xilinx platforms – including FPGAs, SoCs and Versal ACAPs (Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platforms). This week we take a closer look at Vitis with the help of Ramine Roane, Xilinx’s Vice President of Software and AI Product Marketing.
Ramine Roane. Image credit: Xilinx
But first, let’s briefly summarize what this platform is about. Announced on occasion of the Xilinx Development Forum Americas, Vitis allows all developers – including software engineers and AI scientists – to co-develop and optimize hardware and software, using the tools and frameworks they already know and understand, without the need for hardware expertise. As stated in the announcement’s press release, with Vitis developers can leverage integration with high-level frameworks, develop in C, C++, or Python using accelerated libraries, or use RTL-based accelerators and low-level runtime APIs for more fine-grained control over implementation. Vitis is a four-layer stack architecture, with the third layer offering more than 400 optimized and open-source applications across eight libraries: Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms, Solver, Security, Vision, Data Compression, Quantitative Finance, Database, AI. These libraries enable to call pre-accelerated functions using a standard application programming interface (API). At the time of announcement, the fourth layer consisted of Vitis AI, which integrates a domain specific architecture (DSA) that configures Xilinx hardware for frameworks like TensorFlow and Caffe. More DSAs will be released from Xilinx and its ecosystem partners for applications such as video encoding, genome analysis, big data analytics, etc. On November 12th, at the Xilinx Developer Forum Europe, the company announced availability of Vitis and its open source libraries for immediate download, and free of charge. Also available for free download – since December 2nd, as announced on occasion of the Xilinx Developer Forum China – is Vitis AI, the AI inference development platform.
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