New Arm IP brings intelligent, immersive experiences to mainstream markets

By Paul Williamson, vice president and general manager, Client Line of Business, Arm

October 23, 2019--Once the preserve of premium devices, immersive experiences such as AR, high-fidelity gaming, and new AI-based use cases across mobile and home are now being demanded by the mainstream market. Giving developers access to high-performance AI and media IP solutions optimized for everyday devices enables new AI driven use cases, with features such as voice recognition and always-on capabilities, no longer unique to mobile.

AI intelligence is now everywhere from gaming devices to digital TVs (DTVs), and increased compute at the endpoint is required to allow for these responsive experiences. For example, intelligent experiences in DTVs range from smart assistant voice commands, real-time translation for shows in another language, and face recognition to enhance parental controls.

To deliver this, I’m pleased to announce that Arm is launching two new mainstream ML processors, as well as our latest Mali graphics and display processors. Together, this IP represents Arm’s ability to scale, bringing premium experiences to everyday and ultra-efficient consumer devices. The new suite of IP includes:

• Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37 NPUs; enabling AI applications and balancing ML performance with cost, area, bandwidth, and battery life constraints
• Mali-G57 GPU; the first mainstream Valhall architecture-based GPU, bringing immersive experiences through performance improvements
• Mali-D37 DPU; delivering a rich display feature set within the smallest area, making it the perfect DPU for entry-level devices and small display screens

Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37 NPUs: enabling truly heterogeneous compute

Following the earlier introduction of the Arm ML processor (now referred to as the Ethos-N77), the Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37 are the newest members of the Ethos NPU family. Arm Ethos is a suite of products designed to solve complex AI and ML compute challenges allowing the creation of more personalized, immersive experiences in everyday devices. As consumer devices become smarter there is a need for additional AI performance and efficiency via dedicated ML processors. Optimized for the most cost and battery life-sensitive designs, the new Ethos NPUs deliver premium AI experiences on our everyday devices.

Both the Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37 are designed with some basic principals in mind, for example:

• Optimized around support for Int8 and Int16 datatypes
• Advanced data management techniques minimizing data movement and associated power
• Over 200% performance uplift over many other NPUs through techniques such as innovative Winograd implementation

Further, Ethos-N57 features include:

• Designed to provide a balance of ML performance and power efficiency
• Optimized for 2 TOP/s ML performance range

Ethos-N37 features include:

• Design to provide the smallest footprint ML inference processor (<1mm2)
• Optimized for 1 TOP/s ML performance range

For more information on the Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37 NPUs, read our blog.

Mali-G57: GPU that brings intelligent and immersive experiences to the mass market

Mali-G57 brings premium intelligent and immersive user experiences – such as high-fidelity gaming, console-like graphics on mobile, 4K/8K user interfaces on DTVs, and more complex augmented and virtual reality workloads – to the mainstream. This is the biggest segment of the mobile market and our recent announcement with Unity highlights our work to further optimize performance on Arm-based SoCs, CPUs, and GPUs, allowing developers to spend more time creating new content.

Key features of Mali-G57 include:

• 1.3x better performance density across a range of content compared to Mali-G52
• 1.3x improvements in energy efficiency leading to longer battery life
• Foveated rendering support for VR and 60 percent better on-device ML performance for more complex xR workloads

For more information on the Mali-G57, read our blog.

Mali-D37: Arm’s most area efficient display processor

The Mali-D37 DPU packs a rich array of display and performance features within the smallest area possible. For the end-user, this means better visuals and performance on lower cost devices where area matters most, such as entry-level smartphones, tablets, and small display screens up to 2K.

Key features of Mali-D37 include:

• Extreme area efficiency, with DPU configurable to an area of less than 1mm² on 16nm for Full HD and 2K resolutions
• System power savings of up to 30% through offloading core display tasks from the GPU and memory management features, including MMU-600
• Preservation of key display features from premium Mali-D71, including mixed HDR and SDR composition when combined with Assertive Display 5

For more information on the Mali-D37, read our blog.

This new set of IP has been designed with a solution approach in mind, in line with our Total Compute initiative, ensuring it is experience driven and optimized to solve the complex compute challenges of tomorrow’s workloads. Offering higher area efficiency and power savings while increasing performance, the new IP drives to reduce cost and time to market; bringing more high fidelity gaming and console-like experiences to mobile, compute capability to DTVs, and more ML performance for personalized immersive content with increased responsiveness consumers have become accustomed to. Keep watching the mainstream space; the evolution of these devices is about to get exciting!

About Arm

Arm technology is at the heart of a computing and connectivity revolution that is transforming the way people live and businesses operate. Our advanced, energy-efficient processor designs have enabled intelligent computing in more than 150 billion chips and our technologies now securely power products from the sensor to the smartphone and the supercomputer. In combination with our IoT device, connectivity and data management platform, we are also enabling customers with powerful and actionable business insights that are generating new value from their connected devices and data. Together with 1,000+ technology partners we are at the forefront of designing, securing and managing all areas of compute from the chip to the cloud.