New Arm Technologies Enable Safety-Capable Computing Solutions for an Autonomous Future

By Tiera Oliver

Associate Editor

Embedded Computing Design

September 29, 2020

News

New Arm Technologies Enable Safety-Capable Computing Solutions for an Autonomous Future

The new suite of IP includes the Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU, Arm MaliTM-G78AE GPU, and Arm Mali-C71AE ISP, with supporting software, tools, and system IP to enable silicon providers and OEMs.

Arm unveiled new computing solutions to accelerate autonomous decision-making with safety capability across automotive and industrial applications.

The new suite of IP includes the Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU, Arm MaliTM-G78AE GPU, and Arm Mali-C71AE ISP, engineered to work together in combination with supporting software, tools, and system IP to enable silicon providers and OEMs to design for autonomous workloads.

According to the company, these products will be deployed in a range of applications, from enabling more intelligence and configurability in smart manufacturing to enhancing ADAS and digital cockpit applications in automotive.

Cortex-A78AE:

Also according to the company, the new Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU is Arm’s latest, highest performance safety capable CPU, offering the ability to run different, complex workloads for autonomous applications such as mobile robotics and driverless transportation. It delivers:

  • A 30% performance uplift compared to its predecessor.
  • Supports features to achieve the relevant automotive and industrial functional safety standards, ISO 26262, and IEC 61508 for applications up to ASIL D / SIL 3.
  • New enhanced Split Lock functionality (Hybrid Mode) to offer flexibility. Hybrid Mode is designed to enable applications that target lower levels of ASIL requirements without compromising performance and allow the deployment of the same SoC compute architecture into different domain controllers.

Mali-G78AE:

Per the company, Mali is the number one shipping GPU worldwide, and the new Mali-G78AE is Arm’s first GPU to be designed for safety, delivering ideal user experiences and heterogenous compute to safety critical autonomous applications. The new Mali-G78AE enables:

  • A new approach to autonomous GPU workloads with Flexible Partitioning, with up to four fully independent partitions for workload separation for safety use cases.
  • GPU resources can now be utilized for safety-enabled human machine interfaces or for the heterogenous compute needed in autonomous systems. For example, an infotainment system, an instrument cluster with ASIL B requirements, and a driver monitoring system can now all run concurrently and independently with hardware separation within an automotive application.

Mali-C71AE:

Autonomous workloads need to be aware of their surroundings, often through cameras that must operate in a wide range of lighting conditions. To support vision applications across automotive and industrial, the Mali-C71AE offers:

  • The flexibility needed to support both human and machine vision applications such as production line monitoring and ADAS camera systems.
  • Enhanced safety features, supports features to achieve ASIL B / SIL2 safety capability.
  • Support for four real time cameras, or 16 buffered cameras, delivering a 1.2 giga pixel per second throughput.

For more information, visit: https://www.arm.com/

Tiera Oliver, Associate Editor for Embedded Computing Design, is responsible for web content edits, product news, and constructing stories. She also assists with newsletter updates as well as contributing and editing content for ECD podcasts and the ECD YouTube channel. Before working at ECD, Tiera graduated from Northern Arizona University where she received her B.S. in journalism and political science and worked as a news reporter for the university’s student led newspaper, The Lumberjack.

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