New Arm IP brings intelligent immersive experiences to mainstream markets

Immersive experiences that were once exclusive to high-end devices, such as AR, high-fidelity games, and new mobile and home use cases based on AI, are now becoming mainstream market demands. Enabling developers to use high-performance AI and media IP solutions optimized for everyday devices can enable new AI-driven use cases, including voice recognition and always-on features, saying goodbye to the era when these features were exclusive to mobile devices.

Artificial intelligence is already ubiquitous in everything from gaming devices to digital televisions (DTVs), but to enable these responsive experiences, endpoints must have more computing power. For example, smart experiences on DTVs include voice commands for smart assistants, real-time translation of programs, and facial recognition for enhanced parental controls.

To achieve these functions, Arm announced that it will launch two new mainstream ML processors, as well as the latest Mali GPU and DPU. The integration of these IPs represents Arm's ability to adjust products according to needs and bring high-end experiences to consumers' efficient daily life devices. This new IP suite includes:

• Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37 NPUs: Enable AI applications and balance ML performance with cost, area, bandwidth, and battery life.

• Mali-G57 GPU: The first mainstream GPU based on the Valhall architecture, delivering immersive experiences through performance improvements

• Mali-D37 DPU: Achieves rich display functions with the smallest chip area, making it the most suitable display processor (DPU) for entry-level devices and small display screens.

Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37 NPUs: Providing True Heterogeneous Computing

Following the release of the Arm ML processor (now called Ethos-N77), the Ethos NPU family has added two new members, Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37. The Arm Ethos portfolio is designed to solve the challenges of complex AI and ML computing in order to create a more personalized and immersive experience for everyday life devices. As consumer devices become more and more intelligent, it is necessary to provide additional AI performance and efficiency through dedicated ML processors. The new Ethos optimizes designs that are most sensitive to cost and battery life, and the NPU can bring high-quality AI experience to everyday life devices.

The design philosophy of Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37 includes some basic principles, such as:

• Optimized support for Int8 and Int16 data types

• Advanced data management technology to reduce data movement and associated power consumption

• Through the implementation of innovative Winograd technology, the performance is improved by more than 200% compared with other NPUs 

In addition, Ethos-N57 features include:

• Designed to provide balanced ML performance and power efficiency

• Optimized for the 2 teraflop performance range

Ethos-N37 features also include:

• Designed to provide the smallest ML inference processor (less than 1 square millimeter)

• Optimized for the 1 teraflop performance range

Mali-G57: A GPU that brings intelligence and immersive experiences to everyone

Mali-G57 brings high-quality smart and immersive experiences to the mainstream market, including high-fidelity games, graphics effects on mobile devices comparable to video game consoles, 4K/8K user interfaces for DTVs, and more complex virtual reality and augmented reality workloads. This is the largest part of the mobile market segment, and Arm’s recent announcement with Unity emphasizes its efforts to further optimize the performance of its Arm IP-based system-on-chip (SoC), CPU, and GPU, which can allow developers to have more time to create new immersive content.

Mali-G57 key features include:

• 1.3x performance density across all content compared to Mali-G52

• Energy efficiency is improved by 30%, making the battery life longer

• Foveated rendering support for virtual reality (VR) and 60% faster on-device ML performance for more complex XR applications

Mali-D37: Arm's most efficient processor per unit area

Mali-D37 is a DPU that packs rich display and performance into the smallest possible area. For end users, this means better visuals and performance on lower-cost devices such as entry-level smartphones, tablets, and small displays with resolutions below 2k when area is a primary consideration.

Mali-D37 key features include:

• The efficiency per unit area is extremely high. When the DPU supports Full HD and 2K resolution, the area of ​​the 16nm process will be less than 1 mm2.

• System power can be saved by up to 30% by reducing GPU core display work and memory management functions including MMU-600.

• Retains key display features from the high-end Mali-D71, including the ability to mix and match high dynamic range (HDR) and standard dynamic range (SDR) content when combined with Assertive Display 5.

This new set of IP is designed with solutions in mind and is aligned with the original intention of Arm Total Compute to ensure that they are truly experience-driven and optimized to solve complex computing challenges for future workloads. This new set of IP provides higher efficiency per unit area and is more energy-efficient, while improving performance, reducing costs and reducing time to market, bringing higher-fidelity games and console-like experiences to mobile devices, computing complexity to DTV, and higher ML performance for personalized immersive content, as well as the faster response times consumers expect.