Earthquakes pose serious risks to global populations, making early warning systems essential. Conventional methods relying on peak ground displacement and velocity often struggle with the non-stationary nature of seismic signals. This study leverages first-arriving P-wave signals to extract \(\tau _c\) , \(P_d\) parameters for earthquake event classification and proposes an ensemble-based machine learning architecture that outperforms existing classifiers. While the current state-of-the-art single model achieves 91% accuracy, our approach employs three different ensemble models, and finally proposed model (Architecture-3) delivers 96.56% accuracy, representing a notable improvement with a reduced false alarm rate, accomplishing a false positive rate of 1.96%, enhancing reliability for real-time earthquake early warning (EEW) in the Himalayan region. All models are deployed on the PYNQ-Z2 FPGA platform using IIT Roorkee’s PESMOS data, again our proposed Architecture-3 outperform all, achieving 8.1 ms inference latency, 3.0 W power consumption, and moderate PS utilization (48% CPU, 58% memory), confirming feasibility for real-world implementation. These results highlight the potential of ensemble ML for robust and efficient EEW systems.