Arm brings custom instructions to its embedded CPUs – TechCrunch

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTGroup ]

At its annual TechCon event in San Jose, Arm today announced Custom Instructions, a new feature of its Armv8-M architecture for embedded CPUs that, as the name implies, enables its customers to write their own custom instructions to accelerate their specific use cases for embedded and IoT applications.

ARM customers can now tweak new instructions into the chip….

What we’re giving [our customers] here is the flexibility to program your own instructions, to define your own instructions — and have them executed by the CPU,” ARM senior director for its automotive and IoT business, Thomas Ensergueix, told me ahead of today’s announcement.
He noted that Arm always had a continuum of options for acceleration, starting with its memory-mapped architecture for connecting over a bus GPUs and today’s neural processor units.
Customers also can opt for a co-processor that’s directly connected to the CPU, but today’s news essentially allows Arm customers to create their own accelerated algorithms that then run directly on the CPU.
As Arm argues, this setup allows for the lowest-cost (and risk) path for integrating customer workload acceleration, as there are no disruptions to the existing CPU features and it still allows its customers to use the existing standard tools with which they are already familiar.
For now, custom instructions will only be available to be implemented in the Arm Cortex-M33 CPUs, starting in the first half of 2020.
Ensergueix noted that as we’re moving to a world with more and more connected devices, more of Arm’s customers will want to optimize their processors for their often very specific use cases — and often they’ll want to do so because by creating custom instructions, they can get a bit more battery life out of these devices, for example.

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