Arm Announces New Automotive Technologies to Accelerate Development of AI-enabled Vehicles by up to Two Years

By Dipti Vachani, SVP and GM of the Automotive Line of Business, Arm

March 13, 2024 -- The automotive market is going through an unprecedented transformation with demand for more autonomy, increasingly advanced user experiences and the trend toward electrification creating an explosion of software and AI. Vehicle electronics are becoming more complex and to deliver at pace, a fundamental rethink of product development is needed. Today, in a series of industry firsts, Arm and our ecosystem are unveiling the latest Arm Automotive Enhanced (AE) processors alongside new virtual platforms, all made available to the industry from day one to accelerate automotive development cycles by up to two years.

Next-generation AE processors bring Armv9 and server-class performance to automotive for the first time

For the first time, we are bringing Armv9-based technologies to automotive, enabling the industry to take advantage of the AI, security and virtualization capabilities that this latest generation of the Arm architecture delivers. To meet the growing performance demands of today’s vehicles, we are leveraging our leadership in the infrastructure market by bringing server-class Neoverse technology to automotive, along with new Armv9-based Cortex-A products for scalability. The full line-up of products we’re announcing today includes:

• Arm Neoverse V3AE: Bringing Neoverse technology to the automotive sector for the first time, delivering server-class performance for AI-accelerated autonomous and ADAS workloads
• Arm’s first v9-based Cortex-A processors purpose-built for automotive:
  • Arm Cortex-A720AE: Delivering industry-leading sustained performance with SoC design flexibility for a broad range of software-defined vehicle (SDV) applications
  • Arm Cortex-A520AE: Providing leading power efficiency with functional safety features to scale across automotive use cases
• Arm Cortex-R82AE: The highest-ever performing real-time processor for functional safety which delivers 64-bit computing to real-time processing for the very first time
• Arm Mali-C720AE: A configurable ISP optimized for the most demanding computer and human vision use cases
• A range of configurable system IP to enable the Arm silicon ecosystem to deliver scalable, high-performance automotive SoCs

Read more about this new technology, which is already being adopted by leading players, including Marvell, MediaTek, NVIDIA, NXP, Renesas, Telechips, Texas Instruments, and others, in this blog post.

The road ahead: Arm Compute Subsystems (CSS) for Automotive

We are not stopping there. Looking ahead, we see that systems are only going to get more complex, the need for safety will become even greater, and we’ll need to bring all of these compute components together for our partners, standardizing for consistency where it matters. Arm CSS for Automotive will deliver pre-integrated and validated configurations of Arm AE IP optimized for performance, power, and area using a leading-edge foundry process. Our first CSS for automotive is expected to be delivered in 2025.

Virtual prototypes will enable ecosystem to leverage Arm AE IP for software development ahead of silicon

Traditional automotive development cycles are linear: First processor IP is delivered, then silicon development begins, and only when hardware becomes available around two years later, can software developers start. Today we’re changing that with a new approach: virtual prototyping on industry-leading, latest-generation Arm AE IP, which allows software developers to start before the physical silicon is available. We’re partnering with industry leaders including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cadence, Corellium, Siemens and others to deliver these virtual platforms and cloud solutions, which allow for earlier, more seamless development across the full software stack in collaboration with partners including Autoware Foundation, BlackBerry QNX, Elektrobit, Kernkonzept, LeddarTech, Mapbox, Sensory, Tata Technologies, TIER IV, Vector and more. Read more about the new virtual platforms here, and more about our collaborations at the foundational and application software layer here.

Today’s announcement marks a critical step in enabling the automotive ecosystem by unlocking new opportunities for developers and accelerating time to market for leading OEMs, automotive Tier 1 suppliers, silicon partners, and software providers that are all building the future of software-defined vehicles, on Arm.