British chip designer Arm Holdings Ltd. is building on the launch of its Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems ecosystem last year, announcing its most powerful set of blueprints for companies to build customized silicon platforms so far.

Arm first unveiled its Neoverse CSS ecosystem last summer, saying at the time that it’s providing enterprises with a lower-risk path to developing customized silicon for infrastructure workloads. With Neoverse CSS, the chip designer’s technology is being made available to customers in a more convenient way, with pre-integrated and pre-verified chip blueprints designed for various kinds of data center use cases.

Customers can use those blueprints and refine them to create customized chips for more specific, internal workloads. In this way, Arm Neoverse CSS can significantly lower customer’s development costs, while accelerating time to market for customized systems-on-a-chip that are tailor-made for very specific workloads.

In today’s announcement, the company unveiled the all-new N-Series IP that’s said to take performance efficiency to the next level. According to Arm, Neoverse CSS N3 can achieve up to 20% higher performance per watt than the previous-generation Neoverse CSS N2 platform.

The company also revealed that its bringing the compute subsystems concept to its performance-focused V-Series chip blueprints for the first time with the launch of the Neoverse CSS V3 IP. This one is said to deliver an even more compelling 50% increase in performance-per-socket than the company’s previously announced Neoverse CSS offerings.

In a blog post, Mohamed Awad, senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s Infrastructure Line of Business, said Arm Neoverse CSS has already proven to be a game-changer since launching last year.

He described the Neoverse CSS blueprints as optimized, integrated and verified platforms that bring together the key technologies that sit at the heart of any SoC. According to him, they represent the perfect starting point for partners who are looking to prioritize differentiation, SoC optimization and increase their time to market.

“Because Arm engages with our partners at a fundamentally deeper level than any other compute vendor in the industry, Neoverse CSS are specifically designed to maximize TCO for the workloads that matter most and deliver support for key new technologies like chiplets,” Awad said.

According to Awad, the Neoverse CSS IP has been extremely well received by customers so far, with strong adoption by both data center hyperscalers and startups. The chip designs are being used in a diverse range of applications, he said, including cloud compute, networking, data center infrastructure and artificial intelligence. He added that Microsoft Corp.’s new Cobalt processors are just one example of a product based on Neoverse CSS that has already gone into production.

Besides the new IP, Arm said it has expanded its Arm Total Design ecosystem to more than 20 partners, each of whom is committed to ensuring the broad accessibility of performant, efficient solutions that will meet the powerful computing demands of AI workloads in the future.

Arm Total Design is an ecosystem of partners who can help the company’s customers to design and build customized hardware based on the Neoverse CSS designs in the fastest possible time. For instance, customers can access pre-integrated and validated IP and EDA tools from partners such as Alphawave IP Inc., Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Synopsys Inc. to accelerate chip design and integrate essential components such as memory, peripherals and security.

They can also make use of the design services offered by IP providers including ADTechnology Inc., Broadcom Inc., Capgemini SE and Socionext Inc., and then have their chips manufactured by foundry partners such as Intel Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. in much faster timeframes.

Awad said the company has received a lot of feedback from its Total Design ecosystem partners and has used it to shape its recently announced Chiplet System Architecture, which it says will help customers further refine what a robust and interchangeable chiplet ecosystem should look like.

“We are committed to delivering the technology, innovation and ecosystem required so that together, we will make the promise of AI a reality,” Awad said.

Images: Arm