Syntiant’s NDP250 Boosts Memory

Following its success in low-power wake-word detection, Syntiant continues its thrust into vision processing with its new processor, the NDP250. Backed with its next-generation Core 3 architecture, the NDP250 delivers up to five times the throughput of its predecessors. Depending on the use-case the chip could consume anywhere from 0.2 mW to 100 mW, with an always-on, full-featured computer vision application consuming under 10 mW.

Announced nearly three years after the NDP200, Syntiant’s NDP250 aims to broaden functionality to include vision and audio processing tasks in a single chip. In multimodal-AI environments, the chip can serve as a voice interface that understands and produces human language, while the heavier large language model (LLM) inference is handled in the cloud. Syntiant’s experiments saw latency reduced by about 50% relative to processing exclusively in the cloud.