Arm-China Zhouyi NPU
Zhouyi is Arm-China’s family of neural processing units, also called AIPUs, licensed to SoC vendors for on-device AI inference. The NPU does not depend on the host CPU architecture, so it is found in both Arm and RISC-V SoCs. It scales from low-power edge designs up to multi-core clusters for high-performance SoCs.
Key Features
- Scalability: From single-core edge configurations up to multi-core clusters.
- CPU Independent: Integrates next to Arm or RISC-V host CPUs.
- Transformer Support: Zhouyi X2 and later accelerate Transformer-based models, including large language models.
- Toolchain: The Zhouyi Compass software stack compiles, quantizes and deploys models from TensorFlow, ONNX and PyTorch.
- Linux Support: Open-source kernel driver, proposed for upstreaming into the Linux
accelsubsystem in 2024.
Generations
| Generation | Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Zhouyi Z1 | 2018 | Arm-China’s first in-house IP, unveiled at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen |
| Zhouyi Z2 | 2020 | Mid-to-high-end applications: security, smart cockpits, ADAS and edge servers. Up to 128 TOPS per SoC |
| Zhouyi X2 | 2023 | Multi-core clusters and Transformer support. Up to 320 TOPS |
| Zhouyi X3 | 2025 | DSP + DSA design for large model inference. 8 to 80 FP8 TFLOPS per cluster |
SoCs with Zhouyi NPU
| SoC | NPU Performance |
|---|---|
| Cix CD8180 / P1 | 30 TOPS |
| SiEngine SE1000 | 3.34 TOPS + 3.5 TOPS (two NPU cores, Zhouyi Z2) |
| Allwinner R329 |
Software
The Zhouyi Compass software stack is open source and available on Arm-China’s GitHub:
- Compass Unified Parser: Converts models from common frameworks into the Compass float IR.
- Compass Optimizer: Quantizes the float IR into an optimized quantized or mixed IR for Zhouyi NPUs.
- Compass NPU Driver: Linux kernel driver and runtime for Zhouyi NPUs.
- Compass Integration: Integration scripts and examples for the Compass stack.
- Compass Apache TVM: Apache TVM with Zhouyi NPU support for model optimization and heterogeneous execution.
- Compass ONNX Runtime: ONNX Runtime with a Zhouyi NPU execution provider.
- Model Zoo: Pre-converted models for Zhouyi NPUs.