Arm Gives Glimpse of AI Core

One smartphone maker beta testing RTL

Rick Merritt, EETimes
5/22/2018 05:00 AM EDT

AUSTIN, Texas — Arm sketched the inner workings of its machine-learning core at a press and analyst event here. Engineers are nearly finished with RTL for the design with hopes of snagging a commitment within weeks for use in a premium smartphone in 2019 or later.

Analysts generally praised the architecture as a flexible but late response to a market that is already crowded with dozens of rivals. However, Arm still needs to show detailed performance and area numbers for the core, which may not see first silicon until next year.

The first core is aimed at premium smartphones that are already using AI accelerator blocks from startup DeePhi (Samsung Galaxy), Cambricon (Huawei Kirin), and in-house designs (iPhone). The good news for Arm is that it’s already getting some commercial traction for the neural-networking software for its cores, released as open source, that sits under frameworks such as TensorFlow.

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