Stefan Mileschin

Today Arm announces its newest addition to the Cortex-M series, the new Cortex M55. In addition to the new CPU microarchitecture which brings several new improvements, we also see the introduction of the new Ethos-U55 NPU IP that is meant to be integrated with the new M55 core. Arm’s new IP is meant to advance the machine learning and inferencing capabilities of billions of low-power embedded devices over the next several years, and expand its product portfolio for new use-cases.

We’ve seen Machine Learning become quite the buzzword over the past several years, but today the ecosystem has evolved to the point that it’s no longer just a brand-new novelty, but rather quickly becoming a useful feature to the point that it’s being increasingly deployed in various systems and use-cases in the industry. Arm sees the endpoint AI market particularly an area where we’ll be seeing explosive growth over the coming years, and this is the area that Arm wants to cover with the new IP releases.

The new Cortex-M55 is a new generation IP more closely related to the M33, but brings a few new architectural advances with it that promise some large performance and flexibility improvements when it comes to machine learning as well as vector instructions.

The Ethos-U55 is a dedicated “microNPU” dedicated inference accelerator that ties in with a Cortex-M class CPU and offers the performance and power efficiency of a dedicated NPU, or MAC-engine would usually bring to the table – all in within the similar small footprint of the M-class IPs.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15494...osu55-micronpu