Driving Sustainable Innovation in Datacenter Technology: Arm’s Total Design Ecosystem Expands
A year after its launch, Arm’s Total Design ecosystem has rapidly evolved, nearly doubling in size and emphasizing the importance of global silicon innovation for enhanced sustainability in technology. As datacenters grapple with the pressures of increasing power demands, artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, and the complexities of chip development, Arm has positioned itself at the forefront of these challenges.
Eddie Ramirez, Arm’s Vice President for go-to-market in the infrastructure line of business, highlighted the company’s commitment to addressing these pressing issues through a collaborative approach. In his recent blog post, he outlined how Arm Total Design was introduced to create a robust ecosystem of industry partners focused on accelerating the development of custom silicon. By harmonizing efforts across various sectors, Arm aims to construct the datacenters of the future, utilizing Arm Compute Subsystems (CSS) to enhance performance.
The Arm Total Design ecosystem is now a multivendor framework, encompassing over 30 partners, including notable additions like Alcor Micro, Egis, PUF Security, and SemiFive. This collaboration has advanced to focus on developing chiplet and system-on-chip (SoC) solutions that integrate capabilities from initial design to foundry manufacturing.
Innovative Collaboration for AI Datacenters
The ecosystem’s impact is evident in real-world applications, particularly within the realm of AI computing. A recent partnership involving Arm, Samsung Foundry, ADTechnology, and Rebellions aims to launch an AI CPU chiplet platform specifically designed for cloud computing, high-performance computing (HPC), and AI/machine learning (ML) workloads. This innovative platform features Rebellions’ Rebel AI accelerator, built with the Neoverse CSS V3-powered chiplet from ADTechnology, all fabricated using Samsung Foundry’s cutting-edge 2nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) advanced process technology.
This collaboration promises substantial improvements in performance and energy efficiency, with estimates indicating a two- to three-fold efficiency increase for GenAI workloads, a crucial aspect in today’s computing landscape.
Taejoong Song, head of foundry business development at Samsung Electronics, characterized the partnership as a means to fulfill stringent performance and efficiency needs in HPC and AI design. He expressed enthusiasm about leveraging the flexibility offered by Arm CSS and the collaborative spirit of the Arm Total Design ecosystem to expedite the adoption of advanced technology solutions among hyperscalers and cloud service providers.
A Foundation for Sustainable AI Infrastructure
The emergence of Arm Total Design marks a significant step forward in establishing sustainable AI datacenter infrastructure. It is already facilitating the rapid development of Arm-based test chips and chiplet products powered by Neoverse’s N-series and V-series CSS. Notably, Alcor Micro has announced plans to develop a chiplet aimed at AI/ML training and inference tasks, while Alphawave has introduced its own advanced compute chiplet tailored to AI/ML, HPC, and emerging 5G/6G applications.
Impressively, Arm Total Design partners, including Alphawave, Cadence, and proteanTecs, are actively validating third-party intellectual property products with CSS on advanced nodes, ensuring compliance with Arm’s stringent standards. This validation ensures that partners can efficiently create CSS-based custom silicon, benefitting from a seamless software experience.
Arm has maintained a longstanding commitment to ensuring software operability on its platform, with all major frameworks and operating systems now functioning on Arm architecture. As a result, the diverse range of silicon solutions emerging from the Arm Total Design ecosystem can harness a rich and interconnected software landscape.
One recent advancement is the introduction of Arm Kleidi technology, which optimizes CPU-based inference for open-source projects like PyTorch and Llama.cpp. This development is vital for partners in the Arm Total Design ecosystem who are crafting CSS-based chiplets for edge AI computing, providing them with integrated capabilities without requiring additional accelerators.
The expansion of Arm’s Total Design ecosystem underscores the potential for innovation in the AI datacenter space, paving the way for more efficient, sustainable computing solutions as the industry moves forward.
