Arm Introduces Ethos NPU Family, Mali-G57 GPU, and Mali-D37 Display Processor

Arm has just announced four new IP solutions with the most interesting being Ethos NPU (Neural Processing Unit) family with both Ethos-N57 and Ethos-N37 NPUs for mainstream devices, but the company also announced the new Arm Mali-G57, the first mainstream Valhall GPU, as well as Arm Mali-D37 DPU (Display Processing Unit) for full HD and 2K resolution.

Arm Ethos NPU Family

There are three members of the new Ethos family, and if you’ve never heard about Ethos-N77 previously, that’s because it was known as Arm ML processor. The three NPU’s cater to different AI workloads / price-point from 1 TOPS to 4 TOPS:

Ethos-N37
- Optimized for 1 TOP/s ML performance range
- 512 8×8 MAC/cycle
- 512KB internal memory
- Small footprint (<1mm2)
- For smart cameras, entry smartphones, DTV
Ethos-N57
- Optimized for 2 TOP/s ML performance range
- 1024 8×8 MAC/cycle
- 512KB internal memory
- For mainstream smartphones, smart home hubs
Ethos-N77
- Up to 4 TOP/s
- 2048 8×8 MAC/cycle
- 1-4 MB internal memory
- For computational photography, premium smartphones, AR/VR

All three solutions are optimized around support for Int8 and Int16 data types, leverages data management techniques to minimize data movement and associated power, and are said to deliver over 200% performance uplift over many other NPUs through techniques such as Winograd implementation.

More details about Ethos NPU family can be found on the developer website.

Mali-G57 GPU

Mali G57 vs Mali-G52/G51 – Click to Enlarge

Mali-G57 GPU brings premium features such as console-like graphics on mobile, 4K/8K user interfaces on digital TVs and TV boxes, and more complex augmented and virtual reality workloads to mainstream devices.

Mali-G57 will deliver improved experiences than to a 1.3x better performance density compared to Mali-G52, 1.3x improvements in energy efficiency, foveated rendering support for VR, and 60% better on-device machine learning performance.

Visit the product page and blog post for further information about the new Mali-G57 GPU.

Mali-D37 Display Processor

The Mali-D37 DPU will be found SoC’s designed for entry-level smartphones, tablets, and small display screens up to 2K.

Some of the features of Mali-D37 include:

Area of less than 1mm2 on 16nm process for Full HD and 2K resolutions (36% of the size of Mali-D71)
System power savings of up to 30% through offloading core display tasks from the GPU and memory management features
Leverages many of the features from the premium Mali-D71 display processor such as mixed HDR and SDR composition with Assertive Display 5.
Single display support with up to 4 layers

You’ll find more details on Arm community blog and the product page.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.