Ambiq Unveils Its Next-Generation Edge AI Apollo510 Chip, Boasts of Major Efficiency Gains
Delivering a tenfold performance boost and thirtyfold efficiency gains, the Apollo510 aims to deliver energy-efficient edge AI.
Low-power "intelligent devices" specialist Ambiq has unveiled its next-generation Apollo510 system-on-chip, the first in its Apollo5 family — delivering a claimed 30-fold power efficiency improvement compared to its previous-generation parts.
"We at Ambiq have pushed our proprietary SPOT platform to optimize power consumption in support of our customers, who are aggressively increasing the intelligence and sophistication of their battery-powered devices year after year," claims Ambiq chief technology officer and founder Scott Hanson in support of the company's latest launch. "The new Apollo510 MCU [Microcontroller Unit] is simultaneously the most energy-efficient and highest-performance product we’ve ever created."
The Apollo510, which launches the new Apollo5 family, is built around an Arm Cortex-M55 core running at up to 250MHz and featuring Arm's Helium acceleration extensions. This, the company claims, delivers a tenfold reduction in latency and a halving of energy consumption compared to the Apollo4 — representing a 30-fold overall improvement in energy efficiency when compared with an Arm Cortex-M4 equivalent part.
The Apollo510 includes 3.75MB of on-chip static RAM (SRAM) and tightly-coupled memory (TCM) and 4MB of on-chip non-volatile memory, both representing an increase over the Apollo4, along with high-bandwidth interfaces capable of communicating with external memories at up to 500MB/s peak and over 300MB/s sustained.
"As applications across health, industrial and smart home continue to advance, the need for secure edge AI [Artificial Intelligence] is crucial for next generation devices," claims Arm's Paul Williamson. "Ambiq’s new family of SoCs, built on Arm, will deliver significant performance gains for on-device AI, helping developers and device manufacturers deliver the capabilities required for the AI era."
The Apollo510 also builds on Ambiq's secureSPOT platform, using Arm's TrustZone technology to deliver security features including a trusted execution environment (TEE) with physical unclonable function (PUF), tamper-resistant one-time programming, and secure peripherals.
The Apollo510 is sampling with select customers now, Ambiq has confirmed, with general availability scheduled for the fourth quarter of the year. The company has also confirmed it will be demonstrating the chip live at the Embedded World conference, 9-11 April, at Hall 3 Booth #301.
More information is available on the Ambiq website.