[Blog] draft new release blog post, add images

docs/_drafts/finn-v04b-beta-is-released.md

+---
+layout: post
+title:  "FINN v0.4b (beta) is released"
+author: "Yaman Umuroglu"
+---
+
+Version v0.4b (beta) of the FINN compiler is now available. As with the previous
+release there's a whole lot of new features and bugfixes that have gone in,
+but here are some highlights:
+
+<img src="https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/752936/ALVEO_PRESS.jpg" width="300" align="center"/>
+
+**Build support for Alveo/Vitis + more Zynq variants.** We now have a
+`VitisBuild` transformation to provide a FINN flow that goes all the way to
+bitfiles targeting Xilinx Alveo platforms. This transformation takes care of
+FIFO, datawidth converter and DMA engine insertion so you can simply give it a
+FINN model with HLS layers and let it run.
+Similarly, we've simplified the Zynq build flow with `ZynqBuild` to provide a
+similar experience, which should now be able to support most Zynq and Zynq
+UltraScale+ platforms.
+You can read more about the new hardware build transformations
+<a href="https://finn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hw_build.html">here</a>.
+
+
+**Fully-accelerated end-to-end examples + dashboard.** The FINN end-to-end example networks
+are now fully accelerated on the FPGA, allowing raw images to be directly fed in
+and top-1 indices to be retrieved.
+We now also have a <a href="https://bit.ly/finn-end2end-dashboard">dashboard</a>
+which gets automatically updated with the latest build results from end-to-end
+examples, including FPGA resources and performance.
+This also enables running full-performance accuracy validation on hardware,
+which is now incorporated into the <a href="https://github.com/Xilinx/finn/blob/master/notebooks/end2end_example/tfc_end2end_example.ipynb#validation">end-to-end notebooks</a>.
+
+<img src="https://xilinx.github.io/finn/finn/img/finn-brevitas-debug.png" width="300" align="center"/>
+
+**Brevitas-FINN co-debug support.** We can now export graphs from Brevitas with special DebugMarker nodes (like above) and PyTorch forward hooks to compare intermediate activations between the Brevitas version and FINN-ONNX exported version. This is handy for debugging especially larger networks when they don't export correctly. <a href="https://github.com/Xilinx/finn/blob/dev/tests/brevitas/test_brevitas_debug.py">Here</a> is an example of how to use this.
+
+<img src="https://xilinx.github.io/finn/finn/img/accumulator-minimization.png" width="300" align="center"/>
+
+**Accumulator minimization.** When converting to HLS layers, FINN will now automatically try to pick a minimal bitwidth for each accumulator, based on the precision and size of the dot product it accumulates over. While prior accumulators were at a fixed bitwidth like
+32-bits, the new approach can significantly save on resources by picking e.g. 10-bit accumulators (as per above) where possible. We've also expanded the range of DataTypes available in FINN to cover everything between 1-32 bits to provide more flexibility.
+
+**New layers and cycle estimation.** We've been working on supporting more of the finn-hlslib layers in FINN and
+<a href="https://github.com/Xilinx/finn/tree/dev/src/finn/custom_op/fpgadataflow">the list</a>  has expanded significantly.
+Many of these layers (and their accompanying conversion transformations) will be utilized for new FINN end-to-end example networks,
+like MobileNet-v1, ResNet-50 and a QuartzNet, over the course of the next few releases. These layers also support <a href="https://github.com/Xilinx/finn/blob/dev/src/finn/analysis/fpgadataflow/exp_cycles_per_layer.py">clock cycle estimation</a>
+based on workload and parallelization parameters, allowing the user to estimate performance without having to go to synthesis.
+
+The release (tagged 0.4b) is now available on GitHub.
+We're continuously working to improve FINN in terms of layer, network and
+infrastructure.
+If you'd like to help out, please check out the <a href="https://github.com/Xilinx/finn/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md">contribution guidelines</a> and
+share your ideas on the <a href="https://gitter.im/xilinx-finn/community">FINN Gitter channel</a>!