
ARM Launches Cortex M55 and Ethos-U55 - Symmetry
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3306/arm-launches-the-cortex-m55-and-its-micronpu-companion-the-ethos-u55/
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Legogris
Does anyone have an idea about when we should expect this chips to be
incorporated in devices on the generally available market after an
announcement like this?

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kbumsik
Referring the previous M33 architecture, it took around 2 years to get the
actual chips as a public developer if you don't have a priority from the
vender. And it took less than 3 years to see consumer products using it.

I am not sure but I think this one might be different. In case of M33 it was
fast because you just adopt the chip for the existing solution, but you need
to come up with a new business idea, or a technical stack (that uses machine
learning on the edge devices) to fully benefit from the new chip.

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lmilcin
I think I can explain the delay.

I've been comfortable designing with M3/M4 and for most applications M33 is
not such a big step as to suddenly drop whatever you are doing and redesign
your app around new features.

Even with new products I don't necessarily want to spend time learning new
functionality since the cores I already know do everything I need.

Given possibility to learn new M33 functionality for a bunch of time I
preferred to learn to make my designs more energy efficient with existing
cores, for example.

Only just recently I have decided to start using M33 and mainly for security.

I can imagine most people designing go through similar process. The advantage
of M33/M55 is/will be when you actually have a need for the new features and
when you design your application around those new features, otherwise the
cores provide only incremental improvement.

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lostmsu
What framework can take advantage of these new chips right now?

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m0zg
These are not "chips" this is just "intellectual property" they are releasing.
It will be another couple of years before you start seeing it in silicon, and
then another year or so for them to reach the market _as a part of some
device_, and gain framework support. You're looking at 2023 for this to be
relevant, if all is well.

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kbumsik
Well you can predict a little when you switch the scope to its CPU
capabilities, not chip vendor platforms. For example, Tensorflow-lite recently
added a support for CMSIS-NN (ARM's cuDNN for microcontrollers) so you can run
it on the new ARM chips too when they are released.

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m0zg
Best I can tell, CMSIS-NN is just a software library, and not even a state of
the art one at that. No hardware work was involved in supporting that.

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kbumsik
> No hardware work was involved in supporting that.

It is a hardware-specific library that relies Cortex-M DSP instruction.

> not even a state of the art one at that

What do you expect? Here we are talking about microcontrollers which is always
far behind of the cutting-edge computing.

