The newest open-source Linux kernel driver being worked on for the growing accelerator “accel” subsystem is a new hardware driver courtesy of Arm for enabling their Ethos U65 and U85 NPUs.
The Arm Ethos U65 and Ethos U85 NPUs are designed for edge AI inference workloads. The Ethos U85 is their higher-end eddge AI solution with 20% more power efficient than the Ethos-U65 and higher performing. The Ethos-U85 provides up to 4 TOPs of performance at 1GHz while the Ethos-U65 product material talks up its 1 TOPs performance in a tiny footprint of 0.6mm2. Not nearly as powerful as the AMD and Intel NPUs now in the ~50 TOPs space but the Ethos IP can tie in with Arm SoC designs.
Making this Arm Ethos NPU accelerator driver more interesting besides the fact that it’s open-source is that Arm has been working to interface this with the Mesa Teflon user-space code. The Mesa Teflon code has been designed for NPU uses and so far working with the likes of Vivante (Etnaviv) and Rockchip (Rocket) drivers. This new “Ethos” accelerator driver can also work with Arm’s downstream driver code too.
Those interested in this Arm Ethos accelerator driver under development for the Linux kernel can find the initial request for comments (RFC) patch series now under review.
