ARM Unveils Ethos-U85 NPU and Corstone-320 Platform for Enhanced Edge AI

Arm Targets the AIoT with High-Performance Ethos-U85 NPU and Corstone-320 Platform New accelerator boasts four times the peak performance and a 20 percent power efficiency boost over its predecessors. Arm has announced its latest designs for the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) and edge artificial intelligence (edge AI): the new, faster Ethos-U85 neural processing unit (NPU) and a reference design platform, the Corstone-320, which combines it with an Arm Cortex-M85 CPU and a Mali-C55 image signal processor.

“Our family of Ethos-U NPUs were the world’s first embedded AI accelerators and they’re already in silicon from leading players,” Arm’s Paul Williamson told us during a pre-launch briefing on the company’s latest designs.

“[The] Ethos-U85 delivers a 4x performance uplift for high-performance edge AI applications. Along with the 4x performance improvement, the U85 also delivers 20 percent higher power efficiency over the previous generation, is scalable from 128 to 2,048 MAC units, and delivers four TOPS [Tera-Operations Per Second at INT8 precision] at the highest performance configuration.”

The Ethos-U85 not only offers increased power but also introduces support for transformer networks, which allows for quicker customization and optimization of edge AI applications. This feature enables transformer-based models to be easily adapted to various tasks compared to convolutional networks, making efficient use of hardware resources and suitable for deployment on edge devices with limited computing capabilities. Additionally, the Ethos-U85 maintains backward compatibility with earlier Ethos-U NPU models, ensuring seamless integration with existing toolchains. Meanwhile, the Corstone-320 reference design platform combines the Ethos-U85 NPU with Arm’s Cortex-M85 CPU core and Mali-C55 image signal processor to provide a ready-to-use solution for edge AI development, including virtual hardware support before silicon availability.

However, the Ethos-U85 is not restricted to Arm’s Cortex-M microcontroller-class components alone. Williamson indicated that the NPU is also compatible with Cortex-A application-class cores, allowing for acceleration of machine learning and artificial intelligence tasks in various applications such as robotics, industrial machine vision, and wearables.

Arm has not yet shared detailed benchmarks or power measurements for the Ethos-U85, which will vary by configuration, but Williamson has positioned it as “a milliwatts-level power envelope” design. The company has confirmed it is licensing the NPU to “early adopters” including Alif and Infineon now, with Williamson telling us that silicon is expected to land on the market sometime in 2025.

More information on the Ethos-U85 is available on the Arm blog.

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