ETHEREAL: A 25.6-mus/inf. Low-latency Event-driven Graph-neural-network Processor for High-resolution Vision at the Edge

arXiv:2608.17787v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic vision sensors (DVS) are enticing candidates to reach the low-latency, sub-ms target of edge-vision applications, as they generate events with a mus-level time resolution. However, using DVS front ends also calls for novel algorithm/hardware back ends capable of efficiently handling streams of sparse spatiotemporal events. While event-driven graph neural networks (EV-GNNs) have emerged as a solution on the algorithmic side that is both accurate and efficient, there is no dedicated hardware to date capable of efficiently supporting their mixed requirements of dense-regular compute operations and sparse-irregular memory accesses. We therefore introduce ETHEREAL, the first EV-GNN processor chip, capable of bridging this gap by means of a neighbor-parallel spline-convolution engine combined with a split-2D/3D memory hierarchy that introduces a novel spatiotemporal event-caching mechanism. Measurement results demonstrate a 25.6mus latency and a 1.6muJ energy per end-to-end event-wise inference on the state-of-the art DAGr-GNN workload and VGA-resolution (640x480 pixels) DSEC dataset.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-08-19