STMicroelectronics launches first Cortex-M7 chip with built-in neural accelerator, promising faster industrial edge AI at no price increase

STMicroelectronics unveiled the STM32H7P microcontroller series in Geneva on November 4, combining digital signal processing, edge AI and real-time industrial control in a single chip. According to the company's official blog and press release, it is the first Cortex-M7 microcontroller to include both a hardware signal processor (HSP) and a Neural-ART neural processing unit (NPU), targeting digital power, motor control, condition monitoring and other mission-critical industrial applications. (Cover photo is a file photo of STMicroelectronics, not the new chip.)

Performance: 520MHz, 85 GOPS, fault detection 40 times faster

The STM32H7P runs an Arm Cortex-M7 core at 520MHz with a 2,773 CoreMark score, up to 2MB of Flash and 320KB of tightly coupled memory; the Neural-ART NPU delivers up to 85 GOPS, while the hardware signal processor accelerates Fast Fourier Transforms by about 5 times. The company's application figures are 40 times faster inference for AI arc-fault circuit interrupter models, 20 times faster anomaly detection and 15 times faster AI battery-management processing.

No price increase: production in January 2027, evaluation boards to follow

The series is sampling with OEMs now, with volume production planned for January 2027; pricing starts at $4.43 for 1MB Flash in LQFP100 packaging for 10,000-unit orders, matching previous 1MB STM32H7 models. The NUCLEO-H7P5II evaluation board and STM32H7P5IDK Discovery kit will also be available in January 2027. The company also launched the STM32G5 series for digital power and motor control on the same day.