Arm CMSIS-NN is a collection of efficient neural network kernels used to maximize the performance and minimize the memory footprint of neural networks on Arm® Cortex®-M processor cores. For easy deployment, NXP eIQ integrates CMSIS-NN directly into MCUXpresso SDK, along with all the other Arm CMSIS components.
The use of CMSIS-NN requires more manual intervention than TensorFlow Lite, but yields faster performance and small memory footprint, at the expense of a limited set of neural network operators. Therefore, some models are not supported. Arm also provides a conversion script to parse the network topology and automatically determine the appropriate functions to be used.