Ambarella Aims to Deliver On-Device Gen AI in a Sub-20W Envelope with the New N1-655 SoC
Targeting everything from consumer electronics to autonomous mobile robotics, the company's latest chip supports a range of LLMs and VLMs.
Edge artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Ambarella has announced a new system-on-chip (SoC) built with energy-efficient on-device generative AI workloads firmly in mind: the N1-655, capable of running large language models in just 20W of power.
"The N1-655 continues Ambarella’s industry-leading levels of AI performance per watt, this time for AMRs [Autonomous Mobile Robots] and on-premise AI box applications that require the latest edge gen-AI features while keeping power consumption under 20 watts," claims Ambarella president and chief executive officer Fermi Wang of the company's latest chip. "We tailored this new SoC to run faster, while fine-tuning the most popular LLMs and VLMs [Large Language Models and Vision Language Models] to make them even smaller, eliminating the need for high-bandwidth and cost-intensive cloud processing in this class of applications."
Building atop the company's earlier N1 design, the N1-655 is claimed to be able to decode up to 12 1080p30 video streams while running a combination of multiple multimodal vision language models, large language models, and convolutional neural network models. The company claims that the chip can run models including Phi, Gemma, LLaVA-One-Vision, and Llama on-device on text, image, video, and speech inputs, all while drawing under 20W — "10-100× lower than cloud processors."
In addition to the bare chips themselves Ambarella has announced a new development kit powered by the N1-655, designed to deliver a quick-start for those looking to build around the part. Based on its existing Cooper Developer Platform, the new Cooper Pro will be available following its demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week at an as-yet unannounced price.
The N1-655 itself, meanwhile, is now sampling "upon request," with no word yet on general availability. Interested parties can register for access to the N1-655 product brief on the Amberella website.