Intel and ZTE, a leading technology telecommunications equipment and systems company, have worked together to reach a new benchmark in deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNN). The technology is what many companies in Internet search and artificial intelligence are trying to advance, and includes picture search and matching, as one example. “Perception, such as recognizing a face in an image, is one of the essential goals of the ZTE 5G System,” said Duan Xiangyang, vice president of ZTE Wireless Institute. “Deep learning technology is very important as it can enable such perception in mobile edge computing systems, thus making ZTE’s 5G System smarter.”
The test took place in Nanjing City, China, where ZTE’s engineers used Intel’s midrange Arria® 10 FPGA for a cloud inferencing application using a CNN algorithm. ZTE has achieved a new record – beyond a thousand images per second in facial recognition – with what is known as “theoretical high accuracy” achieved for its custom topology. Intel’s Arria 10 FPGA accelerated the raw design performance more than 10 times while maintaining the accuracy.
