ARM has developed a new version of its high end Cortex-M85 microcontroller, allowing chip designers to add custom instructions for AI applications.
www.eenewseurope.com/, Mar. 13, 2023 –
This has been one of the key advantages of the competing RISC-V instruction set and signals a fight back by ARM ahead of the Embedded World (EW2023) exhibition in Nuremberg, Germany, this week.
Renesas Electronics will be showing the first live demonstrations of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) implementations on the previous generation M85 design.
This first demonstration showcases a people detection application developed in collaboration with UK ML startup Plumerai that identifies and tracks persons in the camera frame in varying lighting and environmental conditions.
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The second demo showcases a motor control predictive maintenance use case with an AI-based unbalanced load detection application using Tensorflow Lite for Microcontrollers with CMSIS-NN.
The latest version of the M85 core, Cortex-M85 r1, includes ARM Custom Instructions (ACI) which allow designers to include custom defined data processing instructions directly on the controller. These were first proposed in 2019 in the ARMv8.1 architecture but are only now being implemented in designs, in part to address the increasing popularity of cores based on the customisable RISC-V instruction set.
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"With ACI on Cortex-M85, the user does not have to turn to alternative architectures to implement a desired instruction encoding. Instead, this can now be done on CPUs that are based on the ARM architecture, with Cortex-M85 being the first high-performing microcontroller to provide this option.," said ARM. "Through ACI, the user is given the power to innovate within the proven AEM architecture, while maintaining the ecosystem advantages of the Cortex-M CPUs."