Storied semiconductor and software company Arm Holdings is starting to make its own chips after nearly 36 years of licensing its designs to companies like Nvidia and Apple. At an event Tuesday in San Francisco, the company revealed the Arm AGI CPU, a production-ready chip built for running inference in an AI data center.
The U.K.-based company developed the chip using its Arm Neoverse family of CPU IP cores and through a partnership with Meta. Meta is also the chip’s first customer of the Arm AGI CPU, which is designed to work harmoniously with the tech company’s training and inference accelerator. Arm also counts OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare among others as launch partners.
While it might have been expected, the move is a historic deviation from Arm’s long tradition of exclusively licensing its designs to other chipmakers. The company, which is majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, will now be competing alongside many of its partners.
The fact that Arm is producing a CPU, as opposed to GPU, is also notable. GPUs, or graphics processing units, have drawn a lot of attention because they are used to train and run AI models. CPUs are an equally important part of a data center rack.
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In its pro-CPU pitch, Arm notes that these chips manage thousands of distributed tasks, including managing memory and storage, scheduling workloads, and moving data across systems. The CPU has become the “pacing element of modern infrastructure — responsible for keeping distributed AI systems operating efficiently at scale,” the company said.
This puts new demands on CPUs and requires an evolution of the processor, Arm said. CPUs are also becoming harder to come by. In March, Intel and AMD told their customers in China that wait times for their products would be longer due to CPU shortages, Reuters originally reported. Computer prices have also started to rise amid the growing shortage.
