Efficient has announced a strategic partnership with GlobalFoundries (GF) to launch a groundbreaking high-performance computer processor, boasting up to 166x greater energy efficiency compared to industry-standard embedded CPUs.
This innovative processor, set to redefine computing by eliminating traditional energy constraints, is expected to be available for early customer access and sampling by summer 2025.
The collaboration between Efficient and GF combines Efficient’s novel processor architecture with GF’s US-based manufacturing capabilities, extensive global reach, and market expertise. This partnership aims to deliver a significant leap in Edge device capabilities and battery life, empowering a new generation of smarter, longer-lasting devices across the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable and implantable health devices, space systems, and the security and defence sectors.
Current general-purpose processors are often over-engineered for versatility, leading to excessive energy consumption due to unnecessary internal data movement and instruction control overheads. The Efficient Fabric processor architecture represents a paradigm shift, offering reconfigurable hardware at compile time, which reduces DC power consumption by up to 99% without sacrificing performance. This innovation sets a new standard for CPUs and creates a new category of ultra-low energy, high-performance processors, making edge computing feasible in scenarios previously hindered by limited energy resources.
When integrated with GF’s 22FDX platform, featuring MRAM and Adaptive Body Biasing (ABB) capabilities, the Efficient processor will enable customers to overcome significant power consumption challenges, facilitating the deployment of advanced devices worldwide.
Brandon Lucia, Co-Founder and CEO of Efficient, stated: “With energy efficiency at the forefront, our founding mission at Efficient was to reimagine general-purpose computing from the ground up and we are incredibly proud to bring our category-defining general-purpose processor to market. Partnering with GlobalFoundries was a natural fit and we are confident that together we will empower the world’s most critical industries to embrace the next evolution of energy-efficient computing with ease and reliability.”
Faisal Saleem, Senior Vice President of End-Markets at GF, added: “We are excited to partner with a brilliant team of engineers at Efficient who are bringing a novel approach to processing architecture and setting a new benchmark for energy-efficient computing using GF’s 22FDX platform. Together with Efficient, we will meet a growing market need for ML-enabled intelligent edge devices across various domains that are power efficient and deliver strong computing performance.”
The Efficient Fabric processor is designed to conserve energy across a wide range of applications, including machine learning-enabled extreme-Edge machine vision, continuous audio intelligence, and versatile sensory and signals intelligence. It also supports developers’ existing code, with compatibility for popular embedded languages like C and TFlite at launch and plans to support additional languages within the first year. This flexibility allows the creation of sophisticated intelligence applications incorporating AI, ML, signal processing, data analytics, and other general-purpose data processing tasks.
For more information about Efficient’s architecture, please visit https://efficient.computer/technology
