Arm has introduced significant additions to its artificial intelligence (AI) platform, including machine learning (ML) IP, the Arm Cortex-M55 processor, and Arm Ethos- U55 NPU. These new devices are designed to deliver a combined 480x uplift in ML performance, the new IP and supporting unified toolchain allows the AI hardware and software developers to implement innovative ideas in the system, this results in unprecedented levels of on-device ML processing for billions of small, power-constrained IoT and embedded devices. Arm has introduced this technology on microcontrollers designed securely from the ground up, which eventually reduced the silicon and development costs and speeding up time to market for product manufacturers looking to enhance Digital signal Processing (DSP) and ML capabilities on-device.
The Cortex-M55 is based on the ArmV8.1-M architecture with Arm Helium vector processing technology for significantly enhanced, energy-efficient DSP and ML performance. It delivers up to a 15x uplift in ML performance and a 5x uplift in DSP performance, with greater efficiency, compared to previous Cortex-M generations.
Combining Cortex-M55 with Ethos-U55 will deliver a combined 480x increase in ML performance over existing Cortex-M processors. Ethos-U55 is highly configurable and specifically designed to accelerate ML interference in the area-constrained embedded and IoT devices. Its advanced compression techniques, save power and reduce ML model sizes significantly to enable execution of neural networks that previously only ran on larger systems.
The Cortex-M55 and Ethos-U55 are fully supported by Arm’s Cortex-M software toolchain. These processors are accompanied by Corstone reference design work with Arm TrustZone to ensure security can be more easily incorporated into the complete system-on-chip. For more information about Cortex-M55 and Ethos U55, visit the official website of Arm.
