This Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley is really dry. In addition to the Tegra Parker car processor announced by NVIDIA, Microsoft also disclosed the secret chip in Microsoft HoloLens MR helmet - Holographic Processing Unit.

In fact, the configuration of Microsoft HoloLens discloses that it uses Intel Atom x5-Z8100 CPU, 2GB RAM, 64GB ROM, 16500mWh, etc. However, on the GPU/HPU, Microsoft has never announced the specific model it uses. In the previously disclosed information, it only marked HoloLens Graphics。

At the Hot Chips Conference, Microsoft officially unveiled this mysterious "HoloLens Graphics", which was named Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) by Microsoft The customized multi DPS integrated chip adopts TSMC 28nm HPC process and is composed of 24 Tensilica DSPs. It can process 1 trillion operation instructions per second, and integrates 8MB SRAM cache and 1GB DDR3 RAM.

It adopts BGA packaging, and the packaging area is only 12x12mm. Compared with software based solutions, it has the advantage of 200 times performance improvement and only 10W power consumption.

Through the extensibility of Tensilica DSP, Microsoft has added 10 special operation instructions to accelerate the processing speed of HoloLens to improve the ability of HPU to process VR and AR data. At the same time, HPU will preprocess the returned data for Windows10 system to reduce the computing burden of CPU (Intel Atom x5-Z8100).