Alif Semiconductor Sets New AI MCU Benchmark with Ensemble E4, E6, and E8 Processors

Alif Semiconductor®, the leading global supplier of secure, connected, power efficient Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) microcontrollers (MCUs) and fusion processors, today released benchmarks on its latest E4, E6 and E8 microcontrollers and fusion processors, extending Alif's advantage in the AI MCU market.

Alif has been a trendsetter in this field since 2021, when it introduced its neural processing unit (NPU)-enabled MCUs to market. Today Alif further demonstrates its leadership in Edge AI with its latest series of Ensemble MCUs. The E4, E6 and E8 are all capable of performing generative AI workloads locally. In addition to this, they contain other new features that make them ideal for high performance data processing and imaging tasks.

The new Ensemble devices contain support for up to two MIPI-CSI image sensors. They also include a fully hardware-accelerated image signal processor (ISP) pipeline that operates at up to 60fps at 2MP resolution. This image throughput is enabled with a new wide memory subsystem for extremely fast on-chip as well as off-chip transactions, pushing inferencing speed well below a millisecond when running AI models from internal, highly power efficient MRAM.

The generative AI capability in the Ensemble E4, E6, and E8 devices is made possible by Alif's future-proof system architecture. Alif is the first silicon provider to offer the Arm® Ethos™-U85 NPU which supports transformer-based ML networks. As an example of power efficiency, an SLM executed on an E4 device draws only 36mW of power when generating text to construct a story based on a user-provided prompt.