Ampere Computing has agreed to acquire AI technology startup OnSpecta, strengthening Ampere Altra performance with AI inference applications. The OnSpecta Deep Learning Software (DLS) AI optimization engine can deliver performance enhancements over commonly used CPU-based machine learning (ML) frameworks.

The companies have already been collaborating and have demonstrated over 4x acceleration on Ampere-based instances running popular AI-inference workloads. The acquisition will include an optimized model zoo with object detection, video processing and recommendation engines.

According to IDC Research, the AI server market is expected to be over $26B by 2024 with an annual growth rate of 13.7%. Ampere customers are seeking ways to manage the costs and the growing requirements for AI inference tasks in both centralized and edge-based infrastructure scenarios. DLS is a seamless binary drop-in library for many popular AI frameworks and will accelerate inference significantly on Ampere Altra.

It enables the use of the Altra-native FP16 data format that can double performance over FP32 formats without significant accuracy loss or model retraining.

“The addition of deep learning expertise will enable Ampere to deliver a more robust platform for inference task processing with lower power, higher performance and better predictability than ever,” said Renee James, founder, chairman and CEO of Ampere Computing.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close in August.