Engine Benchmarks SoC GPU Careers

20× faster than NVIDIA Jetson.Under 10 W. One-fifth the cost.

See the demo Get the FPGA prototype

20× Projected performance compared to NVIDIA Jetson

8 TFLOPS BF16 compute

32 Unified Engines

104 GB/s LPDDR5 bandwidth

<10 W Target compute power

The Unified Engine

FPGA prototype is ready for licensing and deployment.

FPGA Logic footprint

78,348 CLB LUTs

50,045CLB registers

197DSP slices

30 / 16URAM / BRAM tiles

1.05 MBon-chip SRAM

366 MHzTiming closure on Kintex UltraScale+

47 GFLOPSBF16 peak; matrix multiplication reaches 95% utilization

256 or 512-bitAXI master width

BF16 / FP8 / INT8 / INT4 / FP4 / TQ4Matrix, vector and block-quantized formats

Logic circuits optimized for transformer architecture

Matrix multiplication, softmax and element-wise ops all run near peak efficiency.

Benchmarks

Up to 95.6% FLOPS utilization on matrix operations.

RTL on Kintex UltraScale+ in real time. M=K=N=1024, 42 GFLOPS BF16 peak.

OperationGFLOPSof peak

BF16 matrix multiplication — A·Bᵀ 40.17 95.6%

Matmul + bias + activation (GELU / SiLU) 40.03 95.3%

Quantized matrix multiplication — BF16 × INT4/FP4 40.03 95.3%

Softmax fused into matrix multiplication 37.76 89.9%

Memory-efficient attention kernel — ~90%

Streaming quantized matvec — decode mode 31.33 74.6%

Attention kernel, causal, bias enabled

Q·Kᵀ, scaling, bias, softmax and the value matrix multiply in one kernel.

head_dim 64 head_dim 128 head_dim 256

40 30 20 10 0

Theoretical peak 42 GFLOPS

64 128 256 512 1024 2048 3072 4096 6144 8192

Performance by sequence length, in GFLOPS. Peak: 36.87 GFLOPS — 87.8% of theoretical — at sequence length 3072 and head_dim 256.

Multi-engine, cycle-accurate

Tensor parallelism across multiple engines.

A 256×2048 @ 2048×1024 matmul split 192/64 across two engines, recorded by the 8,192-timestamp trace buffer.

Engine 0192×2048 @ 2048×1024

Queue

DMA from DRAM

Compute

DMA to DRAM

Halt

Engine 164×2048 @ 2048×1024

Queue

DMA from DRAM

Compute

DMA to DRAM

Halt

05 ms10 ms15 ms20 ms

Engine 1 finishes its smaller partition first and halts on the hardware synchronization flag until Engine 0 completes.

Head to head · Gemma 3 1B

Faster and more efficient than the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano.

Our engine runs at 333 MHz on 16nm FPGA fabric with a 32-bit DDR4 bus. The Orin Nano is an 8nm ASIC with 128-bit LPDDR5.

2.06× faster decoding 15.63 vs 7.59 tokens/s, llama.cpp with CUDA

3.20× more energy efficient 0.287 vs 0.922 joules per token

5.2× faster than PyTorch CUDA 2.9 tokens/s on PyTorch CUDA

SpecificationApex · Kintex UltraScale+ KU5PJetson Orin Nano 8GB

Memory1333 MHz, 32-bit DDR42133 MHz, 128-bit LPDDR5

Engine clock333 MHz408 MHz GPU

ProcessFPGA fabric8nm Samsung, ASIC

PrecisionBF16 / FP8 / INT8 / INT4 / FP4, plus block-quantized TQ4BF16 / FP32 / INT8 / INT4

Power4.5 W total7 W compute module only

Gemma 3 1B decode15.63 tokens/s7.59 tokens/s

Apex Compute architecture vs CUDA

Microseconds per call, Gemma 3 1B decode

OperationApex µsCUDA µsSpeedup

RMSNorm of input (1,1152)0.78521.44827.33×

Q·K·V projection112.054251.7092.25×

RMSNorm for Q and K2.31346.36320.04×

RoPE for Q and K2.83719.1616.75×

k·qᵀ + softmax + transpose v7.89537.4084.74×

Attention matmul, 4×3.42671.10020.75×

Attention output projection75.054152.5672.03×

MLP gate + GELU505.622836.4371.65×

MLP up projection504.809864.5491.71×

MLP down + element-wise multiply505.148325.4760.64×

Large MVM (1,1152)×(1152,262144)19,04159,5003.12×

Whole model15.63 t/s7.59 t/s2.06×

Tested with llama.cpp on Jetson with CUDA enabled and the CPU limited to one thread. GPU-only performance is approximately 8 tokens/s.

Performance roadmap

A 20× leap, in two stages.

FPGA prototype · live

Already delivers 2× performance vs. NVIDIA Jetson Orin on Gemma 3 1B.

Watch · Jetson Orin vs. Apex FPGA, side-by-side

12nm silicon · tape-out in progress

GlobalFoundries partnership unlocks an additional 10× gain on production silicon.

Kernel utilization Reproduce on GitHub ↗

Attention kernelup to 90%

Softmax utilization> 90%

Matmul utilization> 90%

Normalized raw performance · Gemma 3 1B / Llama 3.2 1B 0× 20×

Jetson Orin NanoSamsung 8nm ASIC · Shipping1×

Axelera Metis AIPU4 cores @ 800 MHz · Shipping2.2×

Apex · FPGA1 engine @ 333 MHz · FPGA prototype2×

Apex · 12nm ASIC32 engines @ 1.6 GHz · Tape-out Q3 '2620×

One Apex engine on an off-the-shelf FPGA — at a third of the clock speed — already hits 90% of Axelera's shipping ASIC throughput.

Axelera and Apex FPGA figures measured end-to-end on Llama 3.2 1B. Jetson and Apex FPGA figures measured end-to-end on Gemma 3 1B. The 12nm simulation assumes 104 GB/s LPDDR5 bandwidth and 32 Apex Compute engines running in parallel. The 2-engine and 6 GB/s DDR bandwidth scenario is reproducible on FPGA via our public repo.

A complete SoC for edge AI.

GlobalFoundries will manufacture our first edge-AI SoC, built around the Unified Engine. MIPS is our SoC design partner for the surrounding system architecture.

Get in touch

Projected · 12 nm ASIC

Projected 12 nm ASIC performance.

Memory-bandwidth-bound on weight matmul, compute-bound on SRAM operations. No structural bottleneck in between.

LPDDR5 provides roughly 104 GB/s, about 10× the bandwidth of our current system. The ASIC engine is designed to run at 1.6 GHz.

≥20×system speedup over Jetson

<10 Wtarget compute power

104 GB/sLPDDR5 bandwidth, 128-bit at 6400 Mbps

1.6 GHzASIC engine clock

Compiler and runtime

Software written for exactly one machine.

One program, any sequence length

One compiled prefill program handles any prompt up to 192 tokens — and the instruction binary is 10× smaller.

Quantization chosen per block

INT4 or NVFP4 is selected for each 64-element K-block by minimizing MSE. Norms and embeddings stay BF16.

Field updates without a reboot

One command reflashes, warm-boots the fabric and re-scans PCIe. No power cycle, no host reboot.

Text, vision, speech and localization models run on the engine today.

Every model runs in the automated test suite.

Gemma 3 1B Gemma 4 E2B Gemma 4 E4B Llama 3.2 1B Llama 3.2 3B Qwen3 1.7B Qwen3 4B Qwen3.5 2B Qwen2.5-VL 3B SmolVLM2 GPT-2 LocateAnything 3B MobileNetV2 + SSD-FPNLite Parakeet streaming ASR MobileSAM Swin

Prototype hardware

Try it on your own bench.

An FPGA PCIe card with two Unified Engines, the XDMA driver, the Python runtime and a working Gemma 3 1B example. The package includes hardware design updates.

Get a board Read the source Join the Discord