Arm Expands microNPU IP for Application Processors

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Arm expands its microNPU IP family with the Ethos-U65, twice as powerful as the Ethos-U55, to accelerate AI in application processors...

www.eetasia.com, Nov. 19, 2020 – 

Arm has created a new version of its microNPU (neural processing unit) IP that is suitable for use alongside Cortex-A CPU cores in application processors. Lead licensee NXP plans to use this IP in an upcoming family of application processors that can handle AI application such as pose estimation, multi-face recognition and object detection in videos, and speech recognition beyond basic keyword spotting.

Ethos-U65

Arm's existing microNPU product, the Ethos-U55, launched in February 2020, is aimed at microcontroller-class products alongside Cortex-M cores. It provides up to 0.5 TOPS of acceleration (based on smaller geometries such as 16 or 7 nm, running at 1 GHz), with between 3 and 256 multiply-accumulate units (MACs). Arm's portfolio also has the Ethos-N77, N57 and N37 which offer 4, 2 and 1 TOPS, respectively.

The Ethos-U65 is designed to maintain the Ethos-U55's power efficiency while doubling the MACs available – up to 512 parallel MACs at 1GHz – for a total of 1 TOPS. This power/performance combination is specifically for use alongside Cortex-A cores in application processor-class devices. The Ethos-U line's native support for ML operators has also been updated and expanded, according to Arm.

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