Arm Drives Next-Generation Performance for IoT with World's First Armv9 Edge AI Platform

By Paul Williamson, SVP and GM of the IoT LoB, Arm

February 26, 2025 -- The AI revolution is no longer confined to the cloud. As our world becomes increasingly connected and intelligent, from smart cities to industrial automation, the need to process AI workloads at the edge is not just advantageous, but essential. Today marks a significant milestone in this evolution with the introduction of the Armv9 edge AI platform, featuring the new Arm Cortex-A320 CPU and the leading AI accelerator for edge AI, Arm Ethos-U85 NPU, enabling AI models of over one billion parameters to run on-device.

Armv9 edge AI platform – efficiency, security and intelligence converge at the edge

OEMs are under pressure to deliver solutions faster than ever before. They need to meet the growing computing demands across IoT applications, such as autonomous vehicles navigating factory floors, smart cameras that can adapt their functionality through software updates, and human-machine interfaces that offer more natural, AI-driven interactions.

To innovate and scale at pace, they need the flexibility to execute their AI workloads where it makes sense, more robust security and increased software flexibility – and Armv9 technology delivers this at scale. Arm’s new platform brings together a brand-new ultra-efficient Armv9 CPU, Cortex-A320, along with the Ethos-U85 NPU with operator support for transformer networks, creating the world’s first Armv9 edge AI platform optimized for IoT. The platform delivers an 8x improvement in machine learning (ML) performance compared to the Cortex-M85-based platform we launched last year.

The ubiquity of our technology means that our partners can now deploy the power of Armv9 technology across the spectrum of computing, from cloud to edge. From silicon partners licensing this technology to build SoCs, to ODMs and OEMs building their next generation devices, this development has been welcomed by leading partners across the industry including AWS, Siemens, Renesas, Advantech and Eurotech.

New Cortex-A320 provides the secure foundation for next generation intelligent IoT devices

The launch of this new edge AI platform marks a significant milestone in the evolution of edge computing. The Cortex-A320 brings advanced AI capabilities and developer benefits to IoT, extending the features of the Armv9 architecture to power efficient devices, alongside comprehensive software support.

Cortex-A320 takes advantage of Armv9 architectural features, such as SVE2 for ML performance, and delivers a 10x ML performance uplift and 30 percent scalar performance uplift compared to its predecessor, Cortex-A35.

The platform’s Armv9.2 architecture also brings advanced security features like Pointer Authentication (PAC), Branch Target Identification (BTI) and Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) to even the smallest Cortex-A devices. This is crucial as edge devices often operate in exposed environments and handle sensitive data.

As edge AI continues to consolidate on Arm, with this new addition to the portfolio, we now offer the most advanced family of Armv9 Cortex processors for IoT, ranging from ultimate performance, to cost and energy-constrained devices.

Read more about the Cortex-A320 in this blog.

Extending Arm Kleidi to IoT

One of the most significant barriers to edge AI adoption has been the complexity of software development and deployment. This is where the platform’s software ecosystem comes into its own. We are extending Arm Kleidi to IoT – a set of compute libraries for developers of AI frameworks designed to optimize AI and ML workloads on Arm-based CPUs with no additional developer work needed. KleidiAI is already integrated into popular IoT AI frameworks, such as Llama.cpp and ExecuTorch or LiteRT via XNNPACK, accelerating the performance of key models, including Meta Llama 3 and Phi-3. As an example, Kleidi AI brings up to 70% more performance to the new Cortex-A320 when running Microsoft’s Tiny Stories dataset on Llama.cpp.

This matters because in today’s fast-paced technology landscape, time-to-market can make or break the success of a product. The new platform also maintains software compatibility with higher-performance Cortex-A processors. This scalability ensures that developers can build solutions that grow and adapt as requirements change. With access to the vast Armv9 ecosystem and compatibility with both rich operating systems such as Linux, and real-time operating systems such as Zephyr, developers have unprecedented flexibility, can leverage existing tools and knowledge, and take advantage of software reuse, reducing time to market and lowering total cost of ownership. With over 20 million active Arm developers worldwide, the potential for innovation is immense.

Looking to the Future

As we look ahead, it’s clear that the future of AI will shift towards the edge and this new Arm platform will be a catalyst for the next wave of IoT innovation. The combination of Armv9 architecture features, advanced AI capabilities and comprehensive software support creates new possibilities for OEMs and developers alike.

The platform’s ability to run tuned large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs) for agent-based AI applications opens up entirely new categories of edge use cases. We’re moving toward a future where intelligent decision-making happens closer to the point of data collection, reducing latency and improving privacy.

This isn’t just another incremental step forward – it represents a fundamental shift in how we approach edge computing and AI processing. For the first time, we’re seeing an Armv9 CPU specifically optimized for IoT applications, bringing together ultra-efficiency and advanced AI capabilities in a way that hasn’t been possible until now.

Supporting partner quotes:

“The evolution of edge AI is accelerating, and advancements in Arm’s IoT computing architecture will bring new possibilities for intelligence at the edge. As a leading player in Edge Computing and Edge AI, Advantech sees this innovation as a significant step forward for the broader Arm ecosystem, enabling smarter, more efficient, and secure AI-driven applications across industries. This innovation will drive industry growth and technological breakthroughs in the edge computing market.” Miller Chang, President of Embedded Sector at Advantech

“The new Arm edge AI platform will enable our customers to run nucleus lite, a lightweight device runtime of AWS IoT Greengrass for constrained edge devices with minimal memory needs, on Armv9 technology. This seamless integration between the two technologies provides an optimized solution for developers to build modern edge AI applications like anomaly detection in precision agriculture, smart manufacturing, and autonomous vehicles.” Yasser Alsaied, Vice President of loT, AWS

“As the IoT market continues to scale, Eurotech continues to deliver solutions giving the performance, security and efficiency customers need for the latest edge AI applications. Arm’s new edge AI platform, provides us with the foundation to build the next generation of rich IoT devices, with Armv9 giving us access to new levels of secure performance, energy-efficiency and software flexibility.” Marco Carrer, CTO, Eurotech

“Renesas aims to serve the widest AIoT market segments with diverse use cases and increasingly intelligent workloads on a truly scalable compute platform. We are excited about the latest Armv9 Cortex-A320 CPU, which delivers high AI/ML performance and enhanced security with power and area efficiency. It will allow us to innovate at pace and implement efficiency with scalability.” Daryl Khoo, VP of Embedded Processing Product Group, Renesas

“Siemens is committed to unlocking the power of AI in edge applications. The new Armv9 based edge AI platform will help to extend our portfolio of highly secure, performant and energy efficient AI innovation to all of our customers, across a range of industrial, smart infrastructure and mobility applications.” Herbert Taucher, VP Research and Predevelopment for IC and Electronics, Siemens AG