Arm has announced a new Ethos NPU aimed at edge AI, industrial automation, and smart home applications. The company has also introduced the Arm Corstone-320 IoT Reference Design to provide a platform designed for edge AI, including real-time image classification and object recognition.
The Arm Ethos-U85 delivers a fourfold performance uplift and 20% higher power efficiency compared to its predecessor. It scales from 128 to 2,048 MAC units (four TOPs @1GHz) and is designed for factory automation and commercial or smart home cameras. Ethos-U85 employs the same toolchain as previous ARM NPUs, enabling developers to make use of existing systems.
Ethos-U85 supports AI frameworks such as TensorFlow Lite and PyTorch and supports Transformer Networks as well as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for AI inference. Transformer Networks will drive new applications, particularly in vision and generative AI use cases for tasks like understanding videos, filling in missing parts of images or analysing data from multiple cameras for image classification and object detection.
The Arm Corstone-320 IoT Reference Design Platform brings together the Arm Cortex-M85 CPU, the Mali-C55 Image Signal Processor, and the new Ethos-U85 NPU to provide performance spanning a broad range of Edge AI applications for voice, audio, and vision. These include real-time image classification and object recognition, and enabling voice assistants with natural language translation on smart speakers. The platform includes software, tools, and support including Arm Virtual Hardware.
“Machine learning workloads for the next generation of Edge AI applications demand high performance in a power-efficient manner,” said Reza Kazerounian, Co-founder and President of Alif Semiconductor. “Alif was the first to market with an Edge AI solution based on Arm Cortex-M55 and Ethos-U55, and we welcome Arm’s latest AI technology, Ethos-U85, which will deliver the compute performance required for our next generation Ensemble family of microcontrollers and fusion processors to address future Edge AI and vision use cases.”
“Edge AI use cases are becoming increasingly sophisticated and require secure, high-performance compute systems to deliver on the opportunities of the AI era,” said Steve Tateosian, SVP of Industrial MCUs, IoT, Wireless, and Compute Business at Infineon. “We look forward to building on Infineon’s long-standing partnership with Arm and enabling these sophisticated systems with Arm Ethos-U85 and the transformer network support it provides for Edge AI deployments.”
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