Cadence just officially launched the Cadence Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP IP, the sixth generation of its highly successful HiFi DSP family, based on a new architecture purpose-built for next-generation voice AI and emerging immersive audio. Compared to the industry-leading Tensilica HiFi 5s DSP, the HiFi iQ DSP offers 2X greater compute performance, 8X higher AI performance, and more than 25% energy savings for most workloads—delivering over 40% performance uplift on numerous audio codecs.

Cadence just officially launched the Cadence Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP IP, the sixth generation of its highly successful HiFi DSP family, based on a new architecture purpose-built for next-generation voice AI and emerging immersive audio. Compared to the industry-leading Tensilica HiFi 5s DSP, the HiFi iQ DSP offers 2X greater compute performance, 8X higher AI performance, and more than 25% energy savings for most workloads — delivering over 40% performance uplift on numerous audio codecs.

Voice and audio AI applications are expanding in the home entertainment, automotive infotainment, and smartphone markets. Cadence Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP IP delivers the performance and energy efficiency required to meet growing SoC computational demands. Compared to the industry-leading Tensilica HiFi 5s DSP, the HiFi iQ DSP offers 2x greater compute performance, 8x higher AI performance, and more than 25% energy savings for most workloads — delivering over 40% performance uplift on numerous audio codecs. Leveraging more than two decades of developing audio solutions and expertise in instruction-set optimization, Cadence has developed a new architecture specifically designed for AI-enhanced, high-performance audio workloads.

“With the increased growth of AI across virtually every facet of the industry, audio and language have become critical interfaces for users,” says Anshel Sag, VP and principal analyst, Moor Insights and Strategy. “The AI performance and energy savings with Cadence’s new flagship Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP position it to enable future AI-enhanced applications and offload processing from other IPs.”

A number of factors are driving the need for greater computation, including the need for richer experiences enabled by the latest immersive audio codecs, audio processing at higher sampling rates, object-based rendering, seamless natural language processing (NLP), and automotive road-noise cancellation (RNC). These usages require increased AI/ML capabilities and enhanced audio/voice pre- and post-processing functions, which demand more computations performed with low latency and low power for on-device processing in edge AI and physical AI applications. Since most of these designs are power constrained, increasing the core’s operating frequency or integrating multiple cores is often not a viable option.

Leveraging more than two decades of developing audio solutions and expertise in instruction-set optimization, Cadence has developed a new architecture specifically designed for AI-enhanced, high-performance audio workloads. The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP addresses the latest audio market trends, delivering significant improvements with greater raw compute performance, and 8X higher AI performance for compute-intensive advanced audio standards. It also delivers more than 25% energy savings across various workloads for very energy-efficient on-device AI processing, with enhanced auto-vectorization for easy programming and fast time to market. Cadence also confirmed integrated support for FP8, BF16, and other formats to run cutting-edge voice AI models.

The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP’s architectural enhancements and increased computational capability enable sophisticated immersive audio codecs such as Dolby MS12, Eclipsa Audio, Opus HD, Audio Vivid, and others to run with higher efficiency than on previous HiFi DSPs. Cadence has already demonstrated more than 40% greater performance than the Tensilica HiFi 5s DSP on multiple codecs. Signal processing algorithms for keyword spotting (KWS), active noise cancellation (ANC), beamforming, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) can be performed seamlessly, enabling state-of-the-art NLP functions. Additionally, multi-stream and multichannel audio playback facilitates rendering of 3D spatial zones and sound bubbles, delivering highly realistic listening experiences.

“With recent advancements in LLMs, SLMs, energy-efficient SoCs, and on-device AI, voice input is poised to become the new keyboard. To enable seamless interaction with the latest physical AI applications, SoC providers need energy-efficient and easily programmable IP capable of running SLMs on-device while performing voice and audio processing seamlessly,” says Boyd Phelps, senior vice president and general manager of the Silicon Solutions Group at Cadence. “As the market leader in DSPs for audio, voice, speech, and AI applications with billions of Tensilica HiFi DSPs in a wide array of embedded products, SoC and system vendors rely on Cadence to continue to push the envelope for performance and energy efficiency.”

The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP is fully capable of running popular small language models (SLMs) and large language models (LLMs) on the DSP itself, acting as an all-in-one AI processor for voice AI applications. For an additional performance boost, it can be easily paired with Cadence’s Neo NPUs or customer-built NPUs to further maximize performance and energy efficiency.

The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP is compatible with the Cadence NeuroWeave Software Development Kit (SDK), TensorFlow Lite for Micro (TFLM), LiteRT, and ExecuTorch environments for AI model execution. The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP also leverages the vast ecosystem of partners and OEMs that have developed software libraries, compilers, codec packages, frameworks, and more to enable easy deployment and fast time to market.

“The Cadence Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP sets a new benchmark for real-time audio processing and raw compute. Their latest-generation DSP gives Dirac’s world-class algorithms the headroom they need to deliver superior clarity, precision, and immersion across consumer and automotive devices. We are excited about the opportunity this unlocks for our partners and end users by offering even better immersion from Dirac Dimensions and the reference room mode, which can recreate unique ‘venue rooms’ in any room,” comments Anders Storm, CEO, Dirac.

“As a long-time Cadence Tensilica HiFi DSP partner, we’re excited to see Cadence continue to advance the state of the art in audio and voice processing. The new HiFi iQ DSP architecture’s gains in compute and AI performance align well with the growing demand for more sophisticated on-device signal processing. At DSP Concepts, we’re focused on enabling our customers to innovate rapidly with Audio Weaver, and Cadence’s continued investment in the HiFi product line provides a strong foundation for delivering the next generation of intelligent audio experiences,” adds Paul Beckman, CTO/Founder, DSP Concepts.

“Cadence Tensilica HiFi DSPs have long been a cornerstone of our success in bringing audio coding and rendering innovations to market. Our customers regard HiFi DSPs as an industry-leading technology platform and appreciate the optimized implementations of our technologies, including LC3plus Lossless and upHear for audio enhancement. With the new HiFi iQ DSP, we’re excited about the enhanced performance and significant boost for deploying Fraunhofer’s AI audio technologies. This will enable device makers to unlock advanced use cases and deploy our next generation of audio solutions in a market where low-power AI has become a key requirement across all segments,” explains Manfred Lutzky, Head of the Audio for Communications Department, Fraunhofer IIS.

The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP will be available to lead customers and partners in the first quarter of 2026, with general availability expected in the following quarter. The HiFi iQ DSP is also targeted for ISO 26262 functional safety (FUSA) certification, making it suitable for safety-critical applications. Future HiFi iQ DSP support for cache-coherent multicore configurations is planned.

Product Brief: Tensilica HiFi DSP Family Product Webpage: HiFi iQ DSP www.cadence.com