HoloLens has specially made 24-core hpu on board

The HoloLens from Microsoft has a 24-core holographic processing unit on board that is specially intended to process all inputs. The 28nm CPU is built by TSMC and according to Microsoft can process a teraflop of calculations.

Microsoft reveals the details of the HoloLens at the Hot Chips conference in California, which The Register attended. The HoloLens-hpu consists of 24 separate dsp’s or digital signal processors: each dsp can perform one specific task very quickly, but not perform general computational tasks. A typical processor has general purpose cores that can perform generic calculations, but do so more slowly than hardware optimized for a task. The HoloLens hpu is produced at 28nm.

The 24 Tensilica computing cores together have 65 million transistors, 8MB SRAM and a separate one on top with 1GB DDR3 RAM. Each computer core or DSP has a different task, such as processing hand gestures or reading the camera feed. Due to the optimizations, the HPU could accomplish this up to 200 times faster than a regular CPU could do in software. Microsoft has even written 10 different additional instructions for the cores to further speed up their work.

For things like apps, there’s a 14nm Intel Atom x86 Cherry Trail soc that also has 1GB of ram at its disposal. All this is on a bga package of 12 by 12 millimeters. The power consumption of the hpu should be less than 10 watts. It is not certain whether these specifications will change again between now and the release. Microsoft’s augmented reality headset should hit the market next year. Developers have been able to get started with the headset since March of this year.

Image: The Register