Arm Holdings Inc.on Wednesday announced new chip designs and software tools to help smartphones handle artificial intelligence (AI), along with changes to how those designs are delivered that could help accelerate their adoption.
Arm's technology has fueled the rise of smartphones with revolutionary design solutions for AI in smartphones and increasingly in PCs and data centers, where chip designers have focused on energy efficiency.
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Smartphones remain Arm's largest single market, where the company provides intellectual property to rivals like Apple, and Android chip suppliers like Qualcomm and MediaTek.
On Wednesday, Arm unveiled new designs for central processing units (CPUs) that it said are better suited for AI tasks and new graphics processing units (GPUs). It will also provide software tools to make it easier for developers to run chatbots and other AI code on Arm chips.
But the biggest change is in how these products are sold. In the past, Arm mostly provided its technology as specifications or abstract designs that chip companies had to translate into a physical design for a chip — no small task when you have to decide how to place billions of transistors, the tiny switches that make up chips.
For the new products, Arm has partnered with Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to deliver physical design drawings that are ready for manufacturing.
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Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager of Arm's client business line, said Arm isn't trying to compete with its customers. Instead, it's trying to help them get to market faster by focusing on other increasingly important parts of both PC and phone chips, such as neural processing units (NPUs) that provide the best AI performance.
This part of a chip has become so important that Microsoft has said that its latest AI features won't work without it. Arm doesn't currently provide NPU technology for phones and PCs, and Bergey said the company aims to provide more "finished and ready" designs that chip companies can plug into their NPUs.
"We're putting together a platform where these accelerators can be very tightly connected," Bergey said.
Source: Reuters
