That the big chipmakers are focusing their efforts on integrating artificial intelligence into users’ daily lives is a fact, and just look at the efforts of the big three (Intel, AMD and NVIDIA) in this regard. But they are not the only ones since ARM China has just announced the development of its own NPU Accelerator for AIand best of all it is designed to be integrated into homemade processorsfacing ordinary users.
It’s important to remember that ARM is not a chip manufacturer, but simply creates designs that it then licenses to third parties so that they can manufacture and implement them in their systems. This means that we will not see products launched directly by ARM, but rather other products based on its design.
An AI accelerator in the form of a Raspberry Pi
ARM China advances the AI accelerator market with its new neural processing unit (NPU), named Zhou Yi. As you can already guess, at the moment this design focuses on low-cost processors from the Asian country (that’s why for now we won’t see it from Intel, NVIDIA or AMD), which could be a good advantage to be able to compete, Now yes, with the big three.
This is due to the simple fact that Arm China, which was initially part of Arm Holdings, for years adopted a development strategy focused solely on the Chinese market. And although this company does not develop general-purpose chips like contemporary processors, its new NPU could become a fundamental component of the inexpensive processors that China is currently developing.
Although Zhouyi has no plans to compete directly with AMD or Intel, its adoption potential is immense, as millions of devices could end up integrating it. The project, which started as a simple proprietary controller, has evolved into an entire ecosystem, to the point where Raspberry Pi-style development boards have even been created like the one you can see in the image above.
This plate, simply called EAIDK310, mounts a Rockwell SoC and a Zhouyi NPU from ARM, and can actually be purchased in stores like AliExpress so users can start experimenting with it if they want. In this case, it only has 1 GB of LPDDR3 RAM, comes without storage (micro SD up to 128 GB is required) and integrates several USB ports and even WiFi and Bluetooth.
One of the most interesting and important things about this announcement is the upcoming addition of a controller Open source for this NPU to the Linux kernel, which would make it much easier for software developers to program, thereby increasing its appeal to chip designers who want to adopt the ARM design.
As an open source controller, developers will be assured that the NPU could be the first of many generations of Arm China, meaning continuity in their creations in the future.
