Arm Unveils New Chip Designs & Tools For Enhanced Smartphone AI

Arm Holdings modified its approach to deliver new chip blueprints and software development tools specifically designed to improve smartphone artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

Arm technology has been instrumental in the rise of smartphones and is finding increasing use in personal computers and data centres, with chip designers valuing its energy efficiency. Smartphones remain their primary market, where Arm supplies intellectual property to major players like Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek.

The company introduced fresh central processing unit (CPU) designs optimised for AI workloads alongside new graphics processing units (GPUs). Additionally, software tools were provided to streamline the execution of chatbot and other AI code on Arm chips.

A significant change lies in the method of product delivery. Previously, Arm supplied technology as specifications or abstract designs requiring chip companies to translate them into physical blueprints – a complex task involving the arrangement of billions of transistors, the microscopic switches forming the foundation of chips.

Arm collaborated with Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for these new offerings to deliver manufacturing-ready physical design blueprints.

Chris Bergey, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Arm’s client line of business emphasised that Arm does not intend to compete with its customers. Their objective is to expedite their time-to-market while enabling them to focus on other crucial chip components for both PCs and phones, such as neural processing units (NPUs) delivering superior AI performance.

The significance of NPUs has grown to the point where Microsoft has declared that its most recent AI features will not function without them. Arm presently does not offer NPU technology for phones or PCs. However, Bergey indicated the company's intention to provide more "complete" designs that chip firms can integrate with their NPUs.