Aug. 28, 2023 — At Hot Chips today, Arm introduced the Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS) designed to enable Arm users to build specialized silicon at lower cost, with less risk and a faster time-to-market compared to discrete IP, according to the company.
Available today, Arm CSS N2 is a pre-integrated, PPA-optimized configuration of the Neoverse N2 platform, Arm said, that accelerates time-to-market by leveraging the performance per watt efficiency of the Neoverse N2 platform. It is optimized for an advanced 5nm process and is delivered in a customizable compute subsystem.
“This allows for new degrees of innovation freedom and can be leveraged as-is or further customized, providing partners the opportunity to differentiate on things like memory, IO, acceleration, physical topology and other areas,” stated Mohamed Awad, SVP/GM, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm, in a blog. “This is all in the pursuit of workload-optimized custom silicon solutions.”
Arm said CSS N2 frees up customers’ engineering resources to focus on SoC and system-level innovation. The company said that for one partner, CSS has helped take a project from an idea to booting Linux on over 100 cores in 13 months; another partner saved more than 80 engineering years’ worth of effort. CSS N2 also enables specialized domain specific accelerator integration – including AI – and achieves improved performance per watt for cloud native workloads.
For more details on CSS N2, here’s a technical blog.
“The world’s data center and network infrastructure are facing extreme pressure, driven both by growing data demands and increasingly difficult power constraints,” Awad said in his blog. “Connected devices and data are accelerating thanks to the 1B 5G subscribers, nearly 15B IoT connections and 120ZB of data generated all requiring a need for more power and performance. Not to mention the slowing of Moore’s Law, the rising cost and complexity of SoC design and the ambitious sustainability goals that are front and center for many organizations. This is driving innovative industry players to respond by delivering efficient, specialized processing.
“Today’s infrastructure is becoming custom-built because relieving the pressure on future infrastructure relies on building specialized processing on top of efficient, extensible, multi-core compute with a strong software ecosystem…,” he said. “…CSS (is) another evolution in how we’re delivering Neoverse platforms. It ensures custom silicon is attainable for more partners by lowering the cost of design and accelerating time to market.”
