Arm is restructuring its IP by market and announcing a new platform strategy to meet the demands of the AI era, a move that will have a significant impact on the semiconductor industry in the future.
The Evolution of Arm: From IP to AI Era Platform
🟦 Arm has completely revamped! New platform strategy for the AI era, “Neoverse” and “Niva” are born, and five other brands are born
Arm has announced a new strategy to revamp its processor IP portfolio from its traditional classification to a dedicated platform for each end-product market. As a result, we will break away from the conventional provision of general-purpose IP such as Cortex-A/R/M and shift to a form that meets the needs of today, which requires AI and highly efficient system design.
The five newly introduced brands are:
- Arm Neoverse: For infrastructure (servers, cloud, etc.)
- For Arm Niva😛 C
- Arm Lumex: For mobile (smartphones, tablets, etc.)
- Arm Zena: Automotive (automotive systems, ADAS)
- Arm Orbis for IoT (consumer electronics, sensors, etc.)
Arm Compute Subsystems (CSS) have been introduced for each platform with an emphasis on shorter design times and power efficiency, and Neoverse CSS (February 2024), Auto CSS (March 2024), and Client CSS (May 2024) are already being deployed.
🟦 Why is Arm reorganizing its naming system now?
Behind this is the explosive growth of AI workloads and the associated challenges of balancing power efficiency and performance. With the spread of generative AI and edge AI, conventional general-purpose IP provision has become insufficient to meet the fragmented needs of each industry.
In particular, in order to take full advantage of Arm’s strength of high power efficiency, a platform strategy that integrates the design of the entire SoC has been indispensable. In fact, Arm already launched Neover in 2018 to roll out a series of servers (V/N/E), and this move extends that success to other markets.
In addition, product generation management and performance hierarchy have been redesigned, and in the future, developers and customers will be able to intuitively understand the positioning of products with labels such as “Ultra/Premium/Pro/Nano/Pico“.
🟦 Summary
Arm has completely revamped its processor IP naming and delivery schemes, and launched a dedicated platform for each market for the AI and IoT era. This has the potential to lead to a major shift in the design philosophy of the semiconductor industry.
This strategic renewal is more than just a naming change, it can also be seen as a sign that Arm is evolving from an “IP provider” to a “fabless manufacturer with an integrated platform.”
