Arm releases first in-house chip in 35-year history

Renowned semiconductor and software company Arm Holdings is starting to manufacture its own chips after nearly 36 years of licensing its designs to companies like Nvidia and Apple.

At an event in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company announced the Arm AGI CPU, a production-ready chip built to run inference in AI data centers. The UK-based company developed the chip through a partnership with Meta, using CPU IP cores from the Arm Neoverse family.

Meta is also the first customer for the chip’s Arm AGI CPU. Arm AGI CPUs are designed to work in harmony with technology companies’ training and inference accelerators. Arm also counts OpenAI, Cerebras, Cloudflare, and more as launch partners.

Arm’s move to making its own silicon has been expected for some time. According to a report from CNBC, the company will start developing the chip in 2023, and the processor is already ready for order.

TechCrunch reached out to Arm for more information about the chip’s development and release schedule.

While it may have been expected, the move is a historic departure from Arm’s long tradition of exclusively licensing its designs to other chipmakers. The company is majority-owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, and will now compete with a number of partners.

Also worth noting is the fact that Arm produces CPUs, not GPUs. GPUs (graphics processing units) have received a lot of attention as they are used to train and run AI models. CPUs are an equally important part of data center racks.

In its pro-CPU proposal, Arm points out that these chips manage thousands of distributed tasks, including managing memory and storage, scheduling workloads, and moving data between systems. CPUs “are the pacing element of modern infrastructure, responsible for making distributed AI systems operate efficiently at scale,” the company said.

This puts new demands on CPUs and requires processor evolution, Arm said.

CPUs are also becoming difficult to obtain.

Reuters first reported that Intel and AMD told Chinese customers in March that they would experience longer wait times for their products due to a CPU shortage. As the shortage worsens, computer prices are also starting to rise.