Arm, all future Cortex-M, Ethos-U
Added immediately to the flexible access portfolio Arm on the 25th expanded its 'Arm Flexible Access' portfolio and added new guarantees to accelerate the development and launch of IoT devices capable of their own AI computation.
▲ Arm-based chip shipments exceed 180 billion units [Image = Arm]
Over the past 30 years, 180 billion Arm-based chips have shipped. Of those, 100 billion have shipped in the past five years. Arm sees IoT devices as another growth engine alongside smartphones, but at the same time, it sees “the IoT ecosystem still has a long way to go in terms of economic value.”
Arm, judging that enhanced AI performance would increase the competitiveness of IoT devices, launched its first micro NPU, the 'Ethos-U55', and the Cortex-M55 MCU with enhanced AI performance in March. In October, it announced the Ethos-U65, which expands the applicability of micro NPU to Cortex-A-based systems.
To expand partners’ use of endpoint AI, Arm has decided to include all of these products in its flexible access portfolio. Flexible Access, announced by Arm in May last year, is a contract model that allows companies to design Arm-based SoCs and only pay for the license fees for Arm IP used at the time of production. Currently, more than 100 companies have signed up.
Arm has committed to △continuing to provide a variety of CPUs that will be included in Flexible Access for five years, and △including all future Cortex-M and Ethos-U products into Flexible Access as soon as they are released.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Arm unveiled Project Cassini, an initiative aimed at simplifying cloud-based software development to enable Arm-based devices to seamlessly connect to any cloud service. Project Cassini provides standards, security, and use cases to build Arm platforms optimized for a variety of tasks.
