Arm offers new designs, software for AI on smartphones

Arm Holdings on Wednesday unveiled new chip blueprints and software tools to help smartphones handle artificial intelligence tasks, along with changes to how it delivers those blueprints that could help speed their adoption.

Arm’s technology powered the rise of smartphones and is increasingly found in PCs and in data centers, where chip designers have gravitated toward its energy efficiency.

Smartphones remain Arm’s biggest single market, where the company supplies intellectual property to arch rivals such as Apple and Android chip suppliers Qualcomm and MediaTek.

On Wednesday, Arm launched new designs for central processing units (CPUs) that it said are better suited to AI work 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.

Arm mostly delivered its technology as either specifications or abstract designs that chip companies then needed to turn into a physical blueprint for a chip – which in turn is no small task when deciding how arrange billions of transistors, the tiny switches that make up chips.

For the new products, Arm worked with Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to deliver blueprints of physical designs that are ready for manufacturing.