Earlier this month at one of the world’s biggest tech tradeshows—Computex 2024 in Taiwan—Arm announced annual updates to its CPU and GPU IP, with a strong focus on AI. With Arm supplying much of the smartphone ecosystem with its chip architecture, this year’s announcements felt different.
These Are The Likely Democratic Presidential Candidates If Biden Drops Out—As Rough Debate Prompts Calls To Stand Downthat introduced the Arm v. 9.2 ISA, which brought significant improvements in security and performance. This new generation is optimized for 3nm process nodes, which are expected to be used for most of next year’s flagship SoCs.
Arm believes that its CPUs are ample for AI workloads and that a lot of the focus on NPUs is somewhat misguided. While I do agree that the data today does support Arm’s arguments for running AI on the CPU, I also believe that most of Arm’s partners will attach an NPU to its CPU and GPU cores because that’s what’s necessary to be a Copilot+ PC,. Arm says that its AI performance on the X925 is 46% faster than the X4, which it seems to believe will be competitive in the world of NPUs and GPUs.