New Arm offering to speed creation of custom data center chips

investing.com:

By Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) — Arm Holdings (NASDAQ:ARM) on Wednesday released a new set of blueprints for making chips that it says could cut the time required to develop data center processors to less than a year.

Arm, whose underlying technology is widely used in the semiconductor industry and powers virtually every smartphone in the world, has been working to take market share away from Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) in the market for data central processors, or CPUs.

Arm, which is majority owned by Japan's SoftBank (TYO:9984) Group, argues that its CPUs will become the preferred pairing with Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA)'s chips in many artificial intelligence data centers, which has helped drive Arm's shares up more than 60% this year.

Arm's technology for creating data center processors is already in use by Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Ampere Computing, which supplies chips to Oracle (NYSE:ORCL). Arm on Wednesday announced a new generation of designs for the computing «cores» — the most central part of a data center chip.

But the larger announcement was that the cores will be offered as part of what Arm calls a «compute subsystem.» That offering ties together the cores with other offerings from Arm into something closer to a complete chip design. Arm argues that customers can use it to go from an initial idea to a test chip in less than a year.

That's about half the time of a traditional two-year chip development cycle. Arm said that Microsoft already used the subsystem technology to design its «Cobalt» chip announced last year.

«That's a huge deal,» Ryan Shrout of chip research firm Shrout Research said of cutting down development time.

Shrout said that one of the