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Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor

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Re: Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor

#41

Post by glenneroo »

sdrothrock wrote: post #24
abainbridge wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, agreed. I screen captured the unprocessed image from the webpage (which has been jpeg'd and therefore lost lots of the shadow detail). I loaded it into a paint package and did a simple (and computationally cheap) histogram adjustment. IMO, the results were at least as good as theirs. And these are the results they cherry picked. Not impressive. I guess most people won't load the image into a paint package to fi…

I don't think the Pixel Visual Core is supposed to do anything new or revolutionary -- the primary purpose is to do these old things FASTER for the user.

Faster and supposedly uses much less power.

> Using Pixel Visual Core, HDR+ can run 5x faster and at less than one-tenth the energy than running on the application processor (AP).

Re: Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor

#43

Post by j_s »

sandGorgon wrote: post #2

This is pretty much Tensorflow on metal. Considering that tensorflow works pretty well on most mobile phone GPU, im betting this feature can be turned on for most phones if Google wants. I would love to see the apples to apples comparison of the Pixel tensorflow computation running on a vanilla snapdragon GPU vs this custom core. Also will be interesting to know why halide and not opencv.

Curious if anyone here knows anything about this alternative for existing phones:

Ask HN: What happened to tensorflow lite? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15494368 (Oct 2017, no comments)

>zitterbewegung: They announced it at Google I/O in May See : https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/17/googles-tensorflow-lite-br... I can't find another announcement is this vaporware?

Re: Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor

#44

Post by windexh8er »

jacobolus wrote: post #26
mholt wrote: post #3

Cool, but am I the only one who thinks the photos on the right (toward the bottom) are a little overexposed / bland / washed-out?

Their results are quite bad compared to a passably competent Photoshop user willing to spend 2 minutes per picture. But if you need the computer to do all the color adjustment for you, so you can post your snapshot on facebook or print it at the local drug store with no manual intervention, this might be a good enough result.

I think you are missing the point with improvements of this nature. Take for example: you have kids. You're at an event with said kids. While I still own a mirror-less micro 4/3rds, I often time don't have it with me. It's easy to snap hundreds of photos in random life events with a good smart phone camera. I personally have almost 2TB of family photo and video and I've got a long way to go. Can you imagine me spending 2 minutes, per picture, on even a fraction of that? Not only have you discounted the "sharability" aspect, the "instant gratification" aspect, and ultimately the tradeoff of results over time. When phones started to wield cameras I intentionally avoided them because of less-than-potato level quality. Now a phone I'm buying must have a fast, quality shooter. I own both Google and Apple products and the Pixel has pushed the bar up significantly in my personal opinion. Do I occasionally edit (mostly in-phone)? Sure. Simple grading and some vignetting goes a long way. Is it professional? No. But the point is I'm not shooting the pictures to win anyone else over. It's an investment in preservation. If I have all of that overhead, as you suggest, it will never get done. I have more useful things to spend time on than editing a few dozen photos on my computer, after I transfer them, then upload them SmugMug and then send out an email or note about it. Instead I can send a group message on Signal and everyone gets the gist in a fraction of the time.

This thread seems to be filled with amateur professionals thinking that their iPhone or Pixel will magically do something optically it can't (yet?). It's good enough, and in some cases a spectacular ROI (both Apple/Google/Samsung/LG/etc) for the price. The photography giants wouldn't sell or develop new products if they felt a lot of pressure in this space. You shouldn't have an expectation that your $1000 phone competes with a few thousand in camera, glass and filters in the right hands. It won't.

Edit: words

Re: Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor

#45

Post by gsnedders »

gehsty wrote: post #23
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure about that. I don't doubt they have the skill to do it, but I doubt they can make the numbers work. Apple can make custom CPU cores because they sell a shitload of phones. Google does not.

Maybe they would license it to manufacturers - use our core design AND our operating system gratis, as long as you send users to our services? Googles ad revenue is so important that they should do absolutely anything and everything to protect it, spending billions on R&D to keep android at the forefront is essential, and at the moment they are only really competitive on the software side (A11 smokes latest snapdrago…

It also gives leverage over Qualcomm etc. wrt availability of security updates.

Re: Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor

#46

Post by GuB-42 »

So what is that IPU exactly? Lots of buzzwords but few actual details about the architecture.

Is it like a integer GPU? The massive amount of ALUs suggests something like that.

But later, I see "Notably, because Pixel Visual Core is programmable, we’re already preparing the next set of applications.". So, is it FPGA-like?

Re: Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor

#47

Post by ggambetta »

> HDR+ addresses this problem by taking a burst of shots with short exposure times, aligning them algorithmically, and replacing each pixel with the average color at that position across all the shots.

This is almost exactly how you'd make super-resolution pictures (adding a nearest-point scaling up step at some point! Yet their super-resolution app (Photoscan) has some sort of artificial upper resolution limit. If they do plan to expose this capability to 3rd parties, I hope someone makes a proper scan/super-resolution app! Also tried Office Lens, also left disappointed :(

Re: Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor

#48

Post by lorenzhs »

amelius wrote: post #38

> The camera on the new Pixel 2 is packed full of great hardware, software and machine learning (ML) Is that hardware only accessible by the camera? If so, isn't that wasteful?

I think the following bit at the very bottom of the article suggests that it isn't:

"HDR+ will be the first application to run on Pixel Visual Core. Notably, because Pixel Visual Core is programmable, we’re already preparing the next set of applications. The great thing is that as we port more machine learning and imaging applications to use Pixel Visual Core, Pixel 2 will continuously improve. So keep an eye out!"

Re: Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor

#49

Post by Twirrim »

baldfat wrote: post #30
abainbridge wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, agreed. I screen captured the unprocessed image from the webpage (which has been jpeg'd and therefore lost lots of the shadow detail). I loaded it into a paint package and did a simple (and computationally cheap) histogram adjustment. IMO, the results were at least as good as theirs. And these are the results they cherry picked. Not impressive. I guess most people won't load the image into a paint package to fi…

BUT it is HDR aka they take multiple of photos and use the under exposed for the sky and the more exposed for the faces. So they are doing MUCH more then a histogram.

Sure, but why even do that if a histogram stretch achieves what is effectively the same end result?

Re: Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor

#50

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

sdrothrock wrote: post #24
abainbridge wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, agreed. I screen captured the unprocessed image from the webpage (which has been jpeg'd and therefore lost lots of the shadow detail). I loaded it into a paint package and did a simple (and computationally cheap) histogram adjustment. IMO, the results were at least as good as theirs. And these are the results they cherry picked. Not impressive. I guess most people won't load the image into a paint package to fi…

I don't think the Pixel Visual Core is supposed to do anything new or revolutionary -- the primary purpose is to do these old things FASTER for the user.

Not just faster but more energy efficient I presume. That's especially important when taking long videos.
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