Low-power processor specialist Arm and high-performance processor specialist Nvidia have announced a partnership to bring deep-learning technology to Internet of Things (IoT) devices through dedicated hardware acceleration.

As part of Arm’s Project Trillium initiative on machine learning, the company has joined forces with Nvidia to integrate its Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) architecture – giving, the pair claim, IoT developers an easy route to integrating artificial intelligence into their products.

“Inferencing will become a core capability of every IoT device in the future,” claims Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of Autonomous Machines at Nvidia, of the deal. “Our partnership with Arm will help drive this wave of adoption by making it easy for hundreds of chip companies to incorporate deep learning technology.”

“Accelerating AI at the edge is critical in enabling Arm’s vision of connecting a trillion IoT devices,” adds Rene Haas, executive vice president, and president of the IP Group, at Arm. “Today we are one step closer to that vision by incorporating NVDLA into the Arm Project Trillium platform, as our entire ecosystem will immediately benefit from the expertise and capabilities our two companies bring in AI and IoT.”

The NVDLA open architecture is based on Nvidia’s Xavier platform, which combines Arm-architecture central processor cores with Nvidia Volta-architecture graphics processor cores on a single system-on-chip (SoC). More information is available on the official website.