Microsoft's HoloLens secret sauce: A 28nm customized 24-core DSP engine built by TSMC

The Register ^ | Aug 22, 2016 | Chris Williams

[dayglored]

Hot Chips Microsoft today revealed a first look at the inside of its Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) chip used in its virtual reality HoloLens specs.

The secretive HPU is a custom-designed TSMC-fabricated 28nm coprocessor that has 24 Tensilica DSP cores arranged in 12 clusters. It has about 65 million logic gates, 8MB of SRAM, and a layer of 1GB of low-power DDR3 RAM on top, all in a 12mm-by-12mm BGA package. We understand it can perform a trillion calculations a second.

It handles all the environment sensing and other input and output necessary for the virtual-reality goggles. It aggregates data from sensors and processes the wearer's gesture movements, all in hardware so it's faster than the equivalent code running on a general purpose CPU. Each DSP core is given a particular task to focus on.

The unit sits alongside a 14nm Intel Atom x86 Cherry Trail system-on-chip, which has its own 1GB of RAM and runs Windows 10 and apps that take advantage of the immersive noggin-fitted display.

The details were revealed today at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California. We grabbed a snap of the slides – apologies for the blurriness, we were sitting far back to get a decent Wi-Fi signal.

[dayglored]

[dayglored]

HoloLens... Mmmm-mm-mm ... PING!

You can find all the Windows Ping list threads with FR search: just search on keyword "windowspinglist".

[Fungi]

OK, put that in the vernacular. Is this comparable to the Meta version?

[clamper1797]

28nm is pretty big nowadays ... I’ve worked on 16nm and 10nm
recently

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

I think when they get all the kinks out of it virtual reality is going to have an amazing future.

[Windflier]

What does ‘nm’ stand for?

[bigbob]

Porn

[Fungi]

You must be kidding. Nanometer, but you are being facetious.

[W.]

Yeah, it’ll reinvent the term ‘money shot’. Duck!

[upchuck]

nm = nanometer.

[The Cajun]

So what's going to be the “$” for this little wiz-bang unit?

[stevio]

Are you designer or layout?

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

That wasn’t the kinks I was talking about but yeah.

[Pikachu_Dad]

nanometer... ten to the minus six meters.

[Jonty30]

nevermind.

[Jonty30]

I think it will be huge in education. The idea of being able to work on simulations until you get it right, before being allowed to do the real thing for the first time will be very beneficial.

[Windflier]

Never mind

[Windflier]

“nanometer”

That’s actually the term that popped into my head, but I’ve never heard of that unit of measure and didn’t want to assume.

Thanks.

[Jonty30]

Yes.

[Windflier]

“Nanometer, but you are being facetious.”

Not at all. I’ve never heard the term, but suspected that’s what it might be.

I don’t speak metric, as a general rule.