Arm offers new designs and software for AI on smartphones
Arm Holdings on Wednesday unveiled new blueprints for chips and software tools that will enable smartphones to perform artificial intelligence tasks, and unveiled changes to the way those blueprints are delivered that could accelerate their adoption.
Arm’s technology has enabled the rise of smartphones and is increasingly being used in PCs and data centers, where chip designers are focusing on their energy efficiency.
Smartphones remain Arm’s biggest market, where the company supplies intellectual property to arch-rivals Apple and Android chip vendors Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Arm on Wednesday unveiled new central processing unit (CPU) designs that it says are better suited for AI work, as well as 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 bigger change is in how those products are sold. In the past, Arm has delivered its technology primarily as specs, or abstract designs, that chip companies then had to translate into a physical blueprint for a chip — no small task when figuring out how to arrange billions of transistors, the tiny switches that make up chips.
For the new products, Arm collaborated with Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to provide blueprints of physical designs that are ready for production.
Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s client line of business, said Arm isn’t trying to compete with its customers. Instead, it’s trying to help them get to market faster while focusing on other increasingly important parts of both PC and phone chips, such as neural processing units (NPUs) that deliver the best AI performance.
That part of a chip has become so important that Microsoft said the latest AI features won’t work without it. Arm doesn’t currently make NPU technology for phones and PCs, and Bergey, the company, is aiming to deliver more “done and baked” designs that chip companies can attach their NPUs to.
“We are combining a platform where these accelerators can be very closely coupled,” Bergey said.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
