Arm Holdings Unveils New AI Designs, Software for Smartphones

Arm Holdings, opens new tab on Wednesday presented new chip blueprints, software tools, and delivery adjustments to help cellphones tackle artificial intelligence duties

Arm’s technology has propelled the proliferation of smartphones and is progressively being integrated into personal computers (PCs) and data centers, where its energy efficiency has attracted silicon designers.

Smartphones continue to be Arm’s largest single market, where the company provides intellectual property to archrivals, including Apple (AAPL.O), Qualcomm (QCOM.O), and MediaTek (2454. TW), and opens a new tab for Android chip suppliers.

Arm introduced new designs for graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs) on Wednesday that the company claimed were better adapted for artificial intelligence (AI) work.

Additionally, it will furnish software tools that facilitate the execution of chatbots and other AI code on Arm processors for developers.

However, the most significant shift occurs in how said products are marketed. Historically, Arm provided most of its technology in abstract designs or specifications that chip manufacturers had to implement into physical chip blueprints.

This was a challenging undertaking, considering how billions of transistors, the minuscule switches that comprise chips, needed to be arranged.

Arm collaborated with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (2330. TW) and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930. KS), opening a new tab and providing blueprints of physically designed products ready for production.

Senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s client line of business, Chris Bergey, stated that Arm intends to refrain from contending with its clients. Instead, its objective is to expedite their time to market.

At the same time, it concentrates on other progressively critical components of PC and phone processors, including neural processing units (NPUs), which deliver optimal performance for artificial intelligence.

That processor component has grown to the point where Microsoft has declared that its most recent AI features cannot function without it. Bergey stated that Arm’s NPU technology for phones and PCs is unavailable. Still, the company intends to provide chip manufacturers with more “done and baked” designs to attach their NPUs.

“We’re combining a platform where these accelerators can be very tightly coupled,” according to Bergey.