At present, the innovation of computing technology is increasingly playing an increasingly important role in driving the development of the digital economy and industrial upgrading. "Computing power is productivity" has become a global development consensus. Topics such as advanced computing, artificial intelligence, and computing power have also become the focus of developers. At Arm Tech Symposia, the annual technology conference, Mohamed Awad, Arm’s senior vice president and general manager of the Infrastructure Division, explained Arm’s latest developments and looked forward to the future of computing.
Mohamed Awad, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Infrastructure Group, Arm
01 Facing new challenges and new demands, Arm accelerates the pace of innovation
Since the beginning of this year, AI technology represented by large models has been in full swing, placing huge demands on computing power. Facing this wave, Mohamed Awad has an insight that artificial intelligence is developing rapidly. One of the biggest challenges currently is memory bandwidth and Can it provide better support for the device. Therefore, we need a new system architecture to achieve more memory bandwidth and memory consistency. In addition, we also need to continuously develop the system architecture to make it flexible enough to help enterprise businesses thrive and find implementation. The best approach to AI. Arm stays ahead with its unique model of flexibility and design, coupled with its strong ecosystem.
Faced with the rapid development of technology and the growing needs of customers, Arm always maintains innovation. Today, Arm has transformed into a computing platform company. While committed to IP licensing business, it also focuses on bringing flexibility of choice to partners through complete and comprehensive solutions, helping them to launch products faster. market. For example, Arm has launched Arm Total Compute Solutions, Arm Neoverse platform, Arm Corstone and SOAFEE, etc. to help developers and companies in the fields of mobile, infrastructure, Internet of Things and automobiles spend more time and energy Focus on developing innovative solutions and accelerating product development and time to market to maintain its competitiveness.
However, under the influence of factors such as growing data demands and increasingly challenging power consumption constraints, data centers and network infrastructure around the world are facing tremendous pressure. In order to alleviate the pressure on future infrastructure, the industry needs to rely on a strong software ecosystem to create dedicated processing capabilities based on efficient and scalable multi-core computing.
Mohamed Awad further explained that from artificial intelligence to 5G, to cloud data centers and the edge, technology pioneers building a new generation of computing infrastructure are turning to custom chips to achieve the dedicated processing power required for scale. Arm is addressing this trend with the launch of Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystem (CSS), which brings a faster, lower-risk approach to putting custom chips within reach for infrastructure. Now Arm has taken another step forward, bringing the broader semiconductor industry together through Arm Total Design to innovate around Arm's basic computing subsystems. No other ecosystem can match this ecosystem's efforts to accelerate time to market and reduce the cost of building high-performance, high-efficiency custom chips.
02 Drive changes in customized chips and empower partners
Mohamed Awad said that we are currently in the era of computing power. Hyper-scale cloud service providers such as Alibaba, AWS, and Microsoft have begun to develop their own chips and strive to maximize the performance and efficiency of each chip to achieve optimal optimization. They will customize it around servers, racks, and even their own data centers based on their use cases, workloads, and more.
With the development of technologies such as GPTs, the amount of data and calculations will only increase, and the customization of chips means that companies can support the increasing amount of data and calculations through technical optimization.
Arm is empowering partners to create customized CPUs and enable innovation. For example, the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper super chip uses Arm Neoverse with NVIDIA GPU to meet the needs of AI performance. For another example, at the AWS re:Invent conference, AWS released the fourth generation processor based on the Arm Neoverse platform-Graviton4. This processor is designed specifically for the infrastructure sector. Compared to Graviton3, Graviton4 offers 30% faster processing, 50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth. In China, Alibaba’s Yitian 710 is a CPU based on the Arm Neoverse platform; Hongjun Microelectronics, Yuxian Microelectronics and Yunbao Intelligent are building server SoC solutions and cloud computing and data center DPU solutions based on the Arm platform respectively. ; Lenovo deploys Arm architecture-based solutions to the 5G field. From the above cooperation cases, we can find that from ultra-large-scale cloud service providers to start-ups, they all choose to empower innovation on the Arm platform.
However, not all developers and companies have mature technical capabilities, and some developers and companies may need more technical help. Insight into the needs of this part, Arm launched Arm Neoverse CSS. Compared with independent IP, Neoverse CSS will enable the Arm ecosystem to create dedicated chips and accelerate product development through lower cost, less risk and shorter time. listing process.
Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystem (CSS)
By using Neoverse CSS, a partner company saves 80 people/year of engineer time. Another company used Neoverse CSS to help their project go from concept to implementation (booting Linux on a system with over 100 cores) in just 13 months. Recently, Microsoft released the Cobalt 100 CPU, which is based on Neoverse CSS.
Arm's innovation continues. Based on Neoverse CSS, Arm launched the Arm comprehensive design ecosystem project, aiming to further combine the power of the ecosystem and join hands with application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design companies, IP suppliers, EDA tool providers, and foundries. Together with firmware development manufacturers, we help simplify the development process of customized chips and make delivery more convenient. Arm comprehensive design further increases the possibilities available to partners in the Neoverse CSS ecosystem, helping partners further accelerate product development.
Arm Total Design ecological project
03 “China is one of Arm’s important markets”
In the above sharing, the author noticed that Mohamed Awad mentioned many times that Arm empowers Chinese companies. Why does Arm value Chinese companies so much?
Mohamed Awad said that China is one of Arm’s very important markets. The basic platform provided by Arm empowers ecosystem partners to continue to innovate and create better products and solutions. Today, the total shipments of Arm architecture chips from Chinese partners have reached 30 billion. In other words, based on shipments in the Chinese market alone, an average of nearly four chips are shipped to every person on the planet. Arm currently has nearly 400 technology licensing customers in China, and this number is still rising every month.
Finally, Mohamed Awad looks forward to using Arm to further help local Chinese partners accelerate innovation, and looks forward to co-creating with Chinese companies in the future.