Arm Brings Transformers to IoT Devices

By Sally Ward-Foxton, EETimes (May 4, 2024)

NUREMBERG, Germany— The next generation of Arm’s Ethos micro-NPU, Ethos-U85, is designed to support transformer operations, bringing generative AI models to IoT devices. The IP giant is seeing demand for transformer workloads at the edge, according to Paul Williamson, senior VP and general manager for Arm’s IoT line of business, though in much smaller forms than their bigger brothers, large language models (LLMs). For example, Arm has ported vision transformer ViT-Tiny and generative language model TinyLlama-1.1B to the Ethos-U85 so far.

“Most machine learning inferencing is already being done on Arm-powered devices today,” Williamson said. “It may seem like the AI explosion came overnight, but the truth is Arm’s been preparing for this moment for a long time. The benefits of edge AI cut across a whole host of segments within IoT…AI needs tight integration between the hardware and the software, and Arm has invested heavily in the last decade.”

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