Arm, chip designer of almost all processors in millions of smartphones around the globe, has patterned its software ecosystem into a huge opportunity for all developers who wish to ride the historic AI revolution.
No less than Rene Haas, CEO of Arm, made this very clear with his opening keynote at the recent Computex 2024 in Taiwan, and reiterated Arm’s determined push to provide developers all over the world the means to revolutionize AI more.
“We’re showing some information at Computex around compute libraries that will essentially make it very, very easy to run these AI workloads on Arm CPUs. Developers, in the past, did not have access to the Arm CPU when they wanted to run an AI application.
“Arm will now be making these libraries available to developers. So they can write the application and it takes advantage of the hardware. It could run three times faster, four times faster.”
In his keynote, Haas cited some historical context on the role that Arm has played in the computing industry for the last several decades, cited some new AI software tools, and then teased the fullhouse Computex attendance with some important architectural breakthroughs to their CPU and GPU IP and related subsystems.
“We are in mobile phones, we are in PCs, we’re in automotive applications, we are in complex AI training, and we are in general-purpose servers. All of those are Arm CPUs and areas that we are going to do compute subsystems.”
Looking back, Haas recalled Arm’s origin in providing the first CPU for Apple’s Newton handheld device, highlighting the fact that building low-power computing engines which run on battery power has been in Arm’s DNA since. Hr dded that all three of the largest cloud computing providers — Amazon’s AWS, Google’s GCP and Microsoft’s Azure—along with Nvidia, are using or have recently announced custom chips that leverage Arm’s Neoverse server CPU IP designs.
In addition to performance enhancements, these new CPU and GPU IP designs are specifically designed to increase the range of applications and packages that can be put together. It is envisioned to create more powerful combinations of Big.little CPU cores and different GPU elements for things like next generation Arm-based PCs, AR headsets, wearables and more.
And make the process of designing these chips easier for their partners, Arm also detailed their CSS for Client offerings. First introduced in the world of Arm-based server designs, the idea behind CSS is to help partners with the circuitry and interconnect between elements to help make a finished chip design.
By bringing CSS to client devices, Arm believes they can help companies take as much as a year off their development time. CSS is specifically designed and optimized for the latest 3nm process technologies, letting companies move to these cutting-edge chip production facilities as quickly as possible.
Then there’s Arm Kleidi, a broad program of software and software community engagements for accelerating AI. With Arm Kleidi libraries put up for popular AI frameworks, Arm now enables developers to transparently access the outstanding AI capabilities of the pervasive Arm CPU, where most of the world’s AI inference workloads from cloud to edge already run today.
With innovations like Arm CSS and Kleidi, Haas expects that more than 100 billion Arm devices will be ready for AI by the end of 2025.
With Arm’s DNA born of devices designed to run off batteries. “Arm is the world’s most power-efficient CPU, and the power savings it delivers are already driving incredible AI innovation.”
This developer support is incredibly important, Haas reiterated, “if we want to experience the societal changes AI can unleash from the tiniest devices at the edge to training and inference in the cloud. Developers need to be able to take the innovation they are doing with AI and have it run on the hardware in a performant, power-optimized, highly executable and predictable state.”
