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AI workloads are rapidly flowing out to the
network edge, accelerating the demand for even more compute power that established
chipmakers and startups alike are rushing to meet.
Silicon vendors over the past month have rolled out new CPUs, accelerators, and platforms designed to address the power, analytical processes, and security demands in a compute environment that by its nature is constrained in many of those areas. That said, the overriding need is to bring all these capabilities as close as possible to where the massive amounts of data are being generated, so for chipmakers, the race is on.
The result will be a range of new silicon options for AI workloads at the edge as the year unfolds. The same day this week that Arm unveiled its
Ethos-U85 neural processing unit(NPU) and Corstone-320
Internet of Things (IoT) reference design platform for edge AI applications at the
Embedded World 2024 show, rival Intel showed off its
Gaudi 3 acceleratorsand Xeon 6 CPUs for the AI edge at the company’s
Intel Vision 2024 event, with CEO
Pat Gelsinger calling AI “the next killer app for the edge.”
“As the edge becomes increasingly important, it’s going to become the dominant AI workload resource,” Gelsinger said. “Research indicates that by 2026, 50% of
edge computingdeployments will involve
machine learning and AI, compared to just 5% today. A killer use case.”
For its part, Qualcomm at Embedded World announced its
RB3 Gen 2 Platform, a hardware and software offering aimed at embedded and IoT uses, including AI edge boxes. All this comes less than a month after
NVIDIAtook the covers off its upcoming
Blackwell family of GPUs, maintaining its pole position for AI workload accelerators.
Startups Are in the Mix
It’s not only the established players but also startups looking to get a foothold in the edge AI space. Israeli startup
Hailo this month
raised $120 million in Series C funding — bringing to more than $340 million that total amount it’s brought in — and launched the Hailo-10 accelerators, designed to run generative AI applications locally without the need for cloud-based services. Another startup,
SiMa.ai, which makes Systems on a Chip (SoCs) of edge AI systems, this month
pulled in $70 million in funding — including from Dell Technologies’ investment arm — growing the amount it’s collected to $270 million.
It will be a boon for chip makers, with Omdia researchers expecting the market for AI processors at the edge to grow from $31 billion in 2022 to
$60 billion in 2028.
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