Feature Name: Arm® Ethos™-U Integration
Start Date: 2020 May
RFC PR: https://github.com/apache/tvm-rfcs/pull/11
GitHub Issue: https://github.com/apache/tvm/issues/8482
# Motivation
Arm® Ethos™-U is a series of NPUs that will enable low-cost and highly efficient AI solutions for a wide range of embedded devices. This RFC introduces the port of Ethos-U into the uTVM compilation flow. The process of compilation relies on the multiple levels of abstraction in TVM and a variety of analysis and optimisation passes to produce c output. In the process of compilation, we rely on the many levels of TVM's IR (and the passes) to perform optimizations to create c-sources that can work with current microTVM deployments.
## Scope:
### Ethos™-U55
Ethos™-U55 is a NPU that is designed to uplift ML performance by working as an offload target for micro-controllers. It can accelerate quantized ML operators such as Convolution2D, Depthwise Convolution, Pooling and Elementwise Operators. For convolution-type operators, Ethos-U55 supports hardware enabled loseless de-compression of weights to increase inference performance and reduce power.
The scope for this RFC is to add support for offloading to the Arm Ethos-U55 NPU. The initial machine learning framework that we use for testing this is TensorFlow Lite. Future RFCs and pull requests will address additional NPUs, such as the Ethos-U65, and other frameworks as the port evolves.
Please refer to Technical Reference Manual (TRM) for more details – https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102420/0200.
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