Arm unveils processors for safe, autonomous applications
Aimed at safe, autonomous decision-making across automotive and industrial applications, Arm has announced a suite of IP which includes the Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU, Arm Mali-G78AE GPU and Arm Mali-C71AE ISP. All are engineered to work together with supporting software, tools and system IP to enable silicon providers and OEMs to design for autonomous workloads. Target applications are enabling more intelligence and configurability in smart manufacturing to enhancing ADAS and digital cockpit applications in automotive designs.
The Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU is Arm’s latest, highest performance safety capable CPU. It offers the ability to run different, complex workloads for autonomous applications such as mobile robotics and driverless transportation. It delivers a 30 per cent performance increase, compared to its predecessor and 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.
It also has enhanced split lock functionality (hybrid mode). This 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.
The Mali-G78AE is Arm’s first GPU to be designed for safety and is intended for heterogenous compute to safety-critical autonomous applications. Flexible partitioning pioneers a new approach to autonomous GPU workloads, says Arm. It enables up to four fully independent partitions for workload separation for safety use cases.
GPU resources can now be utilised for safety-enabled human machine interfaces or for the heterogenous compute needed in autonomous systems, explains Arm. 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.
Autonomous workloads need to be aware of their surroundings, often through cameras that must operate in a wide range of lighting conditions. To support a broad range of vision applications across automotive and industrial, the Mali-C71AE can 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. There is support for four real time cameras, or 16 buffered cameras, delivering a 1.2Gpixel per second throughput.
http://www.arm.com
