AI chip startup Mythic, which underwent a radical restructure and downsizing in November after reportedly “running out of runway with investors”, according to a LinkedIn post by Ty Garibay, former VP of engineering at Mythic, has announced a $13 million investment from existing and new investors. Co-founder Dave Fick has moved into the CEO position; he was previously CTO. Former CEO Mike Henry has left the business, the company told the press today.
Mythic’s technology is based on analog compute-in-memory technology, using an array of Flash transistors. The idea is to use the Flash transistors as variable resistors in an analog computing scheme, which requires driving the transistors at 265 sub-threshold levels (for 8-bit compute). This requires significant calibration and compensation schemes, which is where a large part of Mythic’s secret sauce is. Analog compute is appealing since it can offer very low power, fast computation for matrix multiplication in AI inference at the edge.
The company previously released two products, the M1108 and the M1076. The M1076 is a 25 TOPS (INT8) edge chip with a power envelope of 3 W, designed for video analytics. Latency for YOLOv5 was 33 ms. At the time of launch, Mythic told EE Times that the M1076 was getting traction in video surveillance, industrial machine vision, drones and AR/VR applications.
“Mythic has already seen strong demand for the M1076, so we’re confident that our next-generation processor will be widely adopted in computer vision applications like smart robots, security cameras, drones, and AR headsets,” Mythic’s CEO Dave Fick said in prepared remarks released today. “The potential for analog computing is truly limitless.”
----Form EE Times