Arm has reported that its Arm Total Design ecosystem has doubled in size within a year of its launch, driving global semiconductor innovation to promote sustainability. Data centers are currently facing challenges such as balancing rising power demands with the expansion of AI workloads, increasing chip development costs and complexities, and meeting sustainability standards.

To address these issues, Arm introduced the Arm Total Design initiative, which aims to accelerate the development of custom silicon by creating a collaborative partner ecosystem. This initiative brings together key industry players to jointly develop future-ready data center solutions utilizing Arm Compute Subsystems (CSS).

The ecosystem has rapidly evolved into a multi-vendor, Arm-based small chip and SoC environment, integrating capabilities from design to manufacturing. The number of participating companies has grown to over 30, including recent additions like Alcor Micro, Egis, PUF Security, and SemiFive.

As Arm Total Design progresses, new Arm-based solutions are emerging to support the sustainable operation of AI data centers. For instance, Arm, Samsung Foundry, ADTechnology, and Rebellions are collaborating to develop an AI CPU small chip platform tailored for cloud, high-performance computing (HPC), and AI/ML training and inference workloads. This platform integrates Rebellions' Rebel AI accelerators with ADTechnology's Neoverse CSS V3-powered compute silicon, utilizing Samsung's advanced 2nm gate-all-around (GAA) process technology.

It is claimed that this platform is expected to deliver two to three times the efficiency of general AI workloads, such as large models like Llama 3.1 with 405 billion parameters. The head of Samsung Electronics’ foundry business development stated that the 2nm GAA process is specifically designed to meet the stringent demands of HPC and AI designs.

Arm Total Design and standardized compute subsystems are enabling AI accelerator designers to seamlessly integrate optimized EDA tools, global design expertise, and foundry partnerships, thereby accelerating AI silicon development. With the rapid evolution of AI workloads, tightly coupled CPU computing is essential for supporting the complete AI stack. Areas such as data preprocessing, orchestration, and database enhancement can benefit from the performance and efficiency of Arm Neoverse CPUs.

Arm Total Design is assisting in building the hardware foundation for sustainable AI data centers by speeding up the development of test chips and small chip products based on Neoverse N-series or V-series CSS. Additionally, partners like Alcor Micro and Alphawave are utilizing CSS to create small chips suitable for AI/ML training and inference applications. Furthermore, Arm Total Design partners are validating the compatibility of their third-party IP products with CSS on advanced nodes to ensure they meet Arm’s specifications and standards, enabling the construction of custom silicon based on CSS on leading nodes and providing a seamless software experience.