Anker made its own chip to bring AI to all its products

Anker has announced its own custom silicon that the company says will bring local AI to audio devices, mobile accessories, and IoT devices. The Thus processor is the world’s first neural-net compute-in-memory AI audio chip, which is smaller than traditional chips, and requires less power to run complex computations. That makes it an attractive solution for smaller devices.

When comparing Thus to existing chips, Anker CEO Steven Yang said, “Every AI chip built until now stores the model on one side and does the computation on the other. To think, the device has to carry all those parameters across, many times per second, every single inference. Thus puts the computation where the model already lives. The model never has to move again.”

The first Thus chip will integrate into Soundcore’s upcoming flagship earbuds. The company says it’s starting with earbuds because they’re the most challenging devices to put AI chips in due to size constraints. The small space limits the amount of power available, and because the chip is always active while you’re wearing the earbuds, previous designs had to rely on small neural networks capable of handling a few hundred thousand parameters. But Anker says that with the more energy-efficient compute-in-memory design, the Thus chip is capable of handling several million parameters, significantly increasing the computing power to handle things like complex world noise.

Traditional call noise canceling relies on those small onboard neural networks and can have difficulty isolating your voice in very noisy environments, which results in ambient noise leaking through or voices getting highly compressed, making it difficult to hear. Anker says the larger neural network available on the Thus chip, plus eight MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) microphones and two bone conduction sensors to focus in on your voice, in its yet-to-be-announced earbuds will have significantly cleaner call audio, regardless of the environment.

It sounds intriguing, but we’ll have to see how the compute-in-memory Thus chip performs in the real world against the competition — including the Apple AirPods Pro 3 and Sony WF-1000XM6. Based on a leak in March, the first earbuds to include the Thus chip are likely the Liberty 5 Pro Max and Liberty 5 Pro, expected to be priced at $229.99 and $169.99, respectively. Anker will release full earbuds product details, as well as additional AI-powered features, at Anker Day on May 21.