Axelera brings its low-powered RISC-V chips to Arduino’s miniature computers to run AI at the sting

Edge artificial intelligence chip startup Axelera AI B.V. today revealed it’s partnering with Arduino s.r.l., a maker of specialised, open-source microcontroller boards, to support corporations attempting to implement high-performance artificial intelligence workloads on the network edge.

The partnership will make edge AI more accessible, enabling corporations to perform inference on low-powered chips installed at any location, so data could be processed where it’s created.

Axlera AI sells purpose-built silicon for generative AI and computer vision. Its flagship hardware is generally known as the Metis AI Platform, which relies on the RISC-V architecture that rivals Arm-based chips.

The Metis AI Platform is optimized to run AI on the network edge, featuring an in-memory processing engine, enabling it to process data much faster than traditional computer chips can. In accordance with Accelera, Metis can perform 39.3 trillion computations per second, or 39.3 TOPS, under normal conditions, and boost this to a maximum of 48.16 TOPS when increasing the chip’s clock frequency.

The hardware can be designed to be more energy-efficient than regular central processing units, making it more suitable for the low-powered devices it’s intended to run. Lots of those devices are battery-powered, so that they can profit from processors that run on limited power.

As for Arduino, it’s a significant manufacturer of microcontroller boards, that are miniature computers that measure just a couple of inches across. Also generally known as systems-on-modules or SOMs, they feature a small processor, memory and supporting components, enabling them to perform easy computing tasks with none external assistance.

Alongside its SOMs, Arduino also provides cloud-hosted device management software, which could be used to regulate fleets of Arduino SOM-powered devices, with tools to gather and visualize the sensory data they generate.

Axelera said it’s going to mix its Metis AI chips with Arduino’s SOMs to present customers every little thing they need, including the specialist hardware, data processing components and software, to deploy powerful AI systems on edge devices. It believes it’s going to enable higher performance than has previously been possible, with lower costs than existing edge AI solutions.

The 2 corporations plan to showcase their collaboration at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show 2025 in Las Vegas. They intend to reveal how one in every of Arduino’s Portenta X8 microcontrollers running the Metis AI Platforms can run an offline, pretrained large language model that supports an industrial monitoring system able to processing and analyzing sensory data, resembling temperature, humidity, air quality, CO2 and other details in real time.

The system can run in several environments and on multiple sorts of factory machines. That allows manufacturers to watch production and discover any trends and issues as they occur.

The partnership has enormous potential, in response to Axelera, which said Arduino’s SOMs are already utilized by greater than 33 million people worldwide. Everyone of those users will have the ability to access the Axelera platform and unlock latest possibilities for edge AI, the corporate says.

Axelera co-founder and Chief Executive Fabrizio Del Maffeo (pictured) said the partnership will provide fast, easy-to-access AI technology with minimal power consumption and price. “That is critical for corporations to understand true AI innovation,” he said.

Arduino CEO Fabio Violante agreed, saying the partnership will enable innovators with more powerful and accessible tools for real-world problem solving. “By working with Axelera AI, we’re providing developers and businesses the means to integrate advanced AI capabilities into their projects, opening the door to groundbreaking innovations across industries,” he said.

Photo: Axelera

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