Mobile

ARM announces Cortex M55 CPU & Ethos-U55 NPU IP

The makers of CPUs we use everyday in our mobile devices have announced a new CPU called Cortex M55. The next flagship CPU? Not Exactly. This could eventually enter high-end devices but will be used for machine learning instead of used as CPU.

Cortex M55

Cortex M55

The new Cortex-M55 is the first Arm CPU core that is announced with Vector Extension (Helium) making it the first CPU in this range that is capable of SIMD instructions. It has advanced memory interfaces for fast access to ML (Machine Learning) data and weights. This also has inbuilt ARM TrustZone Security feature.

Enabling AI everywhere requires device makers and developers to deliver machine learning locally on billions, and ultimately trillions of devices,” said Dipti Vachani, senior vice president and general manager, Automotive and IoT Line of Business, Arm. “With these additions to our AI platform, no device is left behind as on-device ML on the tiniest devices will be the new normal, unleashing the potential of AI securely across a vast range of life-changing applications.

Performance: The new core is up to a 5x increase in DSP performance, and the optimised instructions for ML workloads in combination with MVE adds up to a 15x performance improvement compared to previous generation M-cores. This will allow small Internet of Things (IoT) devices to perform their own inferencing.

Ethos U55

Ethos-U55

The new U55 is a small-scale NPU that scales from 32 to 256 MACs, and requires coupling with a Cortex-M class NPU. highly efficient and small memory footprint.

Cortex M55 and Ehos 55 Performance

The performance improvements in such systems that use the M55 and U55 represent very major step-function increases over past generation solutions. Figures that Arm provides include up to a 50x performance uplift in comparison to a Cortex-M7 based system, all while improving energy efficiency by 25x. For IoT devices that required cloud to do AI tasks, they can now do so locally and efficiently.

Source

Abhishek

Abhishek

Abhishek is a Finance Professional and has worked in multiple MNCs. However, he is also an avid tech reader and tinkerer with over 20 years of experience. His passions include 3D animation and drawing Illustrations. His creations can be viewed at www.artstation.com/abhifx