ARM did a Africa tour end of last year and Demonstrated AKIDA in...

ARM did a Africa tour end of last year and Demonstrated AKIDA in the tour
AI Expo Africa
The first event was AI Expo Africa in South Africa, which is billed as the largest AI and Intelligent Automation Trade show on the continent. In fact, this year saw the largest turnout ever, making it the perfect event for Arm to officially launch our Developer Program for the African audience.

At AI Expo Africa, we joined a community of industry stakeholders from the continent to share the latest Arm IP, tools and resources, with a focus on educating and empowering all developers in the region. We also showcased how Arm is forging a path to the future of computing with local ecosystem solutions designed to support the rapid development of AI.

This commitment was on full display through our demos that covered every corner of computing, including laptops, servers, mobile, and the full spectrum of IoT and embedded systems, with all of them having strong propositions for Endpoint and Edge AI use cases. For the Windows Dev Kit 2023 and Ampere Mt. Collins Server demos, these were the first time that the hardware had been showcased in Africa!

The 2023 Windows Dev Kit was loaded with Visual Studio 2022, as well as Visual Studio Code, and the .Net 7 Arm64 software development kit (SDK) – which are some of the latest developments within the Windows on Arm ecosystem. The demo highlighted the speed and performance of Windows on Arm laptops when opening the latest applications and working with the Windows 11 UI installed on the devices. It also showed how it was possible to install all the workloads in Visual Studio 2022, including the Unity and Unreal Engine development tools for gaming.

The Ampere Mt. Collins Server became a talking point throughout the event due to the improved performance and reduced power consumption that it provides. It has two of Ampere’s Altra CPUs that feature 80 Arm Neoverse N1 cores, giving a total of 160 cores. As AI workloads intensify, it is becoming increasingly important for data centers to maintain performance, power efficiency and a low total cost of ownership. This is exactly what the Neoverse compute platform delivers, alongside an unmatched flexibility for our partners to innovate.


The Arm booth at AI Africa Expo
The additional demos were a range hardware, including the Arduino Pro and BrainChip’s Akida, that highlighted how Arm IP can be implemented across embedded systems that utilize AI workloads. As compute power increases, developers can leverage AI workloads for applications that are targeting the smallest, most power and cost-constrained embedded systems, all built on Arm.