ARM Cortex-M55 processor and ARM Ethos-U55 microNPU announced

ARM has announced Cortex-M55 processor and Arm Ethos-U55 NPU, which the company says it the industry’s first microNPU (Neural Processing Unit) for Cortex-M, designed to deliver a combined 480x leap in ML performance to microcontrollers. Features of Arm Cortex-M55 Processor Enhanced endpoint AI performance: The first processor based on Arm Helium technology with the highest, most efficient ML and DSP performance for Cortex-M Flexibility to differentiate: Arm Custom Instructions extends the processor’s capabilities for workload specific optimization Faster time to market: The Corstone-300 reference design offers the fastest, most secure way to incorporate the Cortex-M55 into an SoC Simplified software development: Integrated into a single developer tool chain supported by a broad ecosystem of software, tools, libraries and resources Arm Helium Technology: Helium is a new vector instruction set extension in the Armv8.1-M architecture that enables a significant uplift in DSP and ML capabilities. The vector processing extension adds over 150 new scalar and vector instructions, enabling the efficient compute of 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit fixed point data. 16-bit and 32-bit fixed point formats are used in traditional signal processing applications, such as audio processing. Floating-point Unit: The Cortex-M55 Floating-point Unit (FPU) natively supports vector and scalar half-precision and single-precision floating-point datatypes. Additionally, the ...