Ambarella expands AI SoC portfolio

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Ambarella, an edge AI semiconductor company, continues to expand its AI system-on-chip (SoC) portfolio with the introduction of the 5nm CV75S family.

Credit: Ambarella

These SoCs provide a power- and cost-efficient option for running the latest multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-transformer networks. Designed to be extremely efficient these new devices are helping to make cutting-edge AI technologies feasible for a broader range of cost- and power-constrained devices within security cameras for enterprises, smart cities and retail; industrial robotics and access control; and a host of AI-enabled consumer video devices, such as sports and conferencing cameras.

“With the CV75S family, we are enabling mass-market product designers with the ability to integrate the latest vision-transformer technologies, including VLMs that allow zero shot image classification and multi-modal inferencing for real-time visual analytics without the need for training,” explained Chris Day, VP of marketing and business development at Ambarella. “We’re also bringing our advanced AI-based image processing technology to cameras with a wide range of price points, offering significantly greater image quality for a broad spectrum of applications.”

A typical example of how the CV75S will be used to run VLMs in enterprise cameras is a natural-language search that is processed within the camera to look for any object or scene among the content it has captured.

A multi-modal VLM, such as the contrastive language–image pre-training (CLIP) model, can scour the footage and provide instantaneous results without being trained on that specific object or context. This opens up a whole new range of AI capabilities for enterprise cameras, which can now run AI tasks tailored to their installation and user needs without retraining and deploying new AI models for each task.

This is Ambarella’s first mass-market SoC family to integrate its latest CVflow 3.0 AI engine, which is claims provides 3x the performance over the prior generation with support for VLMs and vision transformers, as well as advanced AI-based image processing.

In addition, the CV75S integrates the latest generation of Ambarella’s image signal processor, 4KP30 H.264/5 video encoding, dual Arm Cortex-A76 1.6GHz cores and USB 3.2 connectivity.

To help accelerate time to market, the CV75S family is supported by Ambarella’s Cooper Developer Platform, which provides comprehensive hardware and software solutions for creating edge AI systems, including powerful, safe and secure compute and software capabilities.

The platform consists of industrial-grade hardware tools, collectively called Cooper Metal; along with Cooper Foundry, which provides a multi-layer software stack that supports Ambarella’s entire portfolio of AI SoCs.