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Ambiq’s Apollo510 tiny AI processor

NPUs don’t have to be universally employed in edge-inferencing systems.

Jon Peddie

Ambiq, an ultra-low-power semiconductor company, integrates specialized AI processing units into its chips, though some earlier designs lacked them. Their focus on energy-efficient microcontrollers using SPOT technology allowed on-chip AI inference for simpler models. While many edge AI tasks don’t require an NPU, complex workloads benefit significantly. Ambiq’s Apollo5 deliberately excludes an NPU for balanced design, as most edge processors handle simple networks. However, their Apollo510 includes a small, eight-wide MAC NPU to address memory bandwidth limitations. The Apollo510, with an Arm Cortex-M55 core and Helium vector extensions, performs vector/matrix operations for edge AI, even though it executes Helium instructions
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