GoKawiilStoried 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 UK-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.
Arm’s transition to making its own silicon has been anticipated for some time. The company started developing the chips back in 2023, according to CNBC reporting, and the processors are already ready to order.
TechCrunch reached out to Arm for more information regarding the timeline of the chip’s development and release.
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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