Alif Publishes Brief Benchmarks for Its Gen AI at the Edge Ensemble E4, E6, and E8 Chip Families
Promises text generation in a mere 36mW and object detection in less than two milliseconds, courtesy of Arm's Ethos-U85.
Edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) specialist Alif Semiconductor has released internal benchmarks for its Ensemble E4, E6, and E8 32-bit microcontroller families, claiming their performance for on-device generative AI (gen AI) tasks "is even better than we had hoped."
"With the E4, E6 and E8 series of Ensemble gen AI products, Alif continues to push the envelope of edge AI applications," claims company president Reza Kazerounian of the company's latest parts. "While existing market solutions are built for real-time control, and not for AI, Alif built an AI-ready architecture from the start. That's why Alif customers are now able to use the E4, E6 and E8 devices to implement transformer-based models and generative AI in edge and endpoint products powered by a small battery."
Alif announced its second-generation Ensemble parts back in January, replacing the Arm Ethos-U55 neural coprocessor in the first-generation E3, E5, and E7 parts with the more powerful but still power-sipping Ethos-U85, paired with a main Cortex-M55 core. Now, the company has delivered the result of internal benchmarks demonstrating exactly what difference that move has made — and, it claims, proving its positioning of the parts as suitable for on-device generative AI workloads.
These benchmarks, the company claims, show the parts delivering "power-efficient object detection" in under two milliseconds, image classification in under eight milliseconds, and the Ensemble E4, which pairs a main Cortex-M55 core running at 400MHz with a secondary core running at 160MHz and backs up its Ethos-U85 coprocessor with two Ethos-U55 cores, executing a small language model (SLM) to generate text based on a user-provided input prompt while drawing only 36mW of power.
Alif positions the chips as ideal for a range of smart products, including live-translation wearable smart glasses, toys that can generate a new story based on the player's prompts, and remote controls capable of interpreting natural language commands.
More information on the parts is available on the Alif Semiconductor website; the company had yet to publicly disclose pricing at the time of publication.