Ambiq Introduces New Apollo510 MCU for Advanced AI and ML Workloads

By Tiera Oliver

Associate Editor

Embedded Computing Design

March 27, 2024

News

Ambiq Introduces New Apollo510 MCU for Advanced AI and ML Workloads

Austin, TX – Ambiq is introducing the new Apollo510, the first member of the Apollo5 SoC family, an MCU leveraging the Arm® Cortex®-M55 CPU with Arm Helium™ to reach processing speeds up to 250MHz.

Arm Helium technology on Apollo510 supports up to 8 MACs per cycle, and half, full, and double precision floating point operations, making it ideal for AI calculations and general signal processing operations. Apollo510 also improves its memory capacity over the previous generation with 4 MB of on-chip NVM and 3.75 MB of on-chip SRAM and TCM.

For extra-large neural network models or graphics assets, Apollo510 has a host of high bandwidth off-chip interfaces, individually capable of peak throughputs up to 500MB/s and sustained throughput over 300MB/s.

Per the company, the Apollo510 achieves up to 10x better latency while reducing energy consumption by around 2x, compared to Ambiq’s previous power efficiency leader, the Apollo4. This combination of performance and efficiency allows our customers to deploy sophisticated speech, vision, health, and industrial AI models on battery-powered devices.

"We at Ambiq have pushed our proprietary SPOT platform to optimize power consumption in support of our customers, who are aggressively increasing the intelligence and sophistication of their battery-powered devices year after year," said Scott Hanson, Ambiq's CTO and Founder. The new Apollo510 MCU is simultaneously the most energy-efficient and highest-performance product we've ever created."

Building upon Ambiq's secureSPOT platform, Apollo510 integrates Arm TrustZone technology with a physical unclonable function (PUF), tamper-resistant OTP, and secure peripherals. These enhancements help designers establish a trusted execution environment (TEE) to develop secure, robust applications and scale their products faster.

With provided energy improvement, the Apollo510 is designed to run today's endpoint AI calculations, including low-power sensor monitoring, always-on voice commands, telco-quality audio enhancement, and more. Manufacturers of IoT devices that perform AI/ML inferencing, such as next-gen wearables, digital health devices, AR/VR glasses, factory automation, and remote monitoring devices, can expand their power budget while adding more capabilities to their devices through the Apollo510's SPOT-optimized design.

The Apollo510 MCU is currently sampling with customers, with general availability in Q4 this year.

Meet Ambiq at the Embedded World Exhibition and Conference on April 9- 11, 2024, for a live product demonstration.

For more information, visit www.ambiq.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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