Ambarella announces GenAI SoC at CES

The SoC provides on-chip decode of 12x simultaneous 1080p30 video streams, while processing that video and running a hybrid of multiple, multimodal vision-language models (VLMs) and traditional CNNs.

The solution's high-processing AI performance suppports most of multimodal VLMs and large-language models (LLMs), while consuming 20 watts of power. The N1-655 reliably runs the Phi, Gemma, LLaVA-OneVision and Llama models, without the need for an Internet connection, on data inputs like visuals and speech in applications such as on-premise AI boxes, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), and smart-city security video recorders.

Following its N1 SoC introduced last year, the company is growing its family of Edge GenAI SoCs for tasks that go beyond what can be done on camera. Both of the current family members process GenAI models locally to improve privacy with state-of-the-art performance per watt, significantly reducing power consumption as well as the total cost of ownership compared with Cloud-based inference processing.

“The N1-655 continues Ambarella’s industry-leading levels of AI performance per watt, this time for AMRs and on-premise AI box applications that require the latest edge GenAI features while keeping power consumption under 20 watts,” commented Fermi Wang, President and CEO of Ambarella. “We tailored this new SoC to run faster, while fine-tuning the most popular LLMs and VLMs to make them even smaller, eliminating the need for high-bandwidth and cost-intensive Cloud processing in this class of applications.”

There is a trend towards doing more GenAI processing at the Edge, due to a bandwidth cost, ongoing service fees and high power usage associated with Cloud processing, alongside data security and privacy concerns. Ambarella uses fine tuning techniques such as GLoRA, reducing the footprint size of popular GenAI models to enable their use in Edge applications.

To support N1-655 based designs, Ambarella is also expanding its Cooper Developer Platform with the new Cooper Pro member of the Cooper developer kit family, which provides industrial-class performance. This kit is powered by the N1-655 and will begin shipping after CES.