Driving the Custom Silicon Revolution with Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems

By Mohamed Awad, SVP & GM, Infrastructure Line of Business

August 29, 2023 -- The world’s data center and network infrastructure are facing extreme pressure, driven both by growing data demands and increasingly difficult power constraints. 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.

The Arm ecosystem is unique in its ability to drive the custom silicon revolution. To fully leverage the benefits of specialized processing requires an architecture that delivers the flexibility to innovate and enable diverse, differentiated solutions while maintaining access to a robust software ecosystem. Flexibility and specialization have always been core tenets for Arm and the philosophy that guides Arm Neoverse, matched by decades of investment in software and careful curation of the Arm architecture. Our partners have leveraged this unique balance between customization and standardization, achieving numerous industry firsts including the first CPU with over one terabyte per second of total memory bandwidth, the first CPU to deliver over 100 cores on a die and the first CPU to bring DDR5 and PCIe Gen5 to market. This innovation is accelerating growth and momentum across all key segments from wireless networking to the cloud.

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. At Hot Chips today, we’re introducing Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS). With CSS, Arm is enabling our ecosystem to build specialized silicon at lower cost, with less risk and a faster time-to-market compared to discrete IP. Importantly, we’re empowering our partners to focus limited resources on key differentiation while Arm does what we do best - deliver the scalable and efficient compute foundation.

Fastest Path to Production Silicon

The first-generation CSS product, Arm CSS N2, is a pre-integrated, pre-validated, PPA-optimized configuration of the Neoverse N2 platform. CSS N2 accelerates time-to-market by leveraging the performance per watt efficiency of the Neoverse N2 platform, optimized for an advanced 5nm process and delivered to partners 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. This is all in the pursuit of workload-optimized custom silicon solutions.

With CSS N2, Arm is freeing up partner engineering resources to focus on SoC and system-level innovation. For one partner, CSS has already helped take a project from an idea to booting Linux on over 100 cores in just 13 months; another partner saved over 80 engineering years’ worth of effort. CSS N2 also enables specialized domain specific accelerator integration – including AI – and achieves market-leading performance per watt for cloud native workloads. CSS N2 is available today and is silicon proven.

For more details on CSS N2, read this technical blog.

The Future of Infrastructure is Specialized and It’s Built on Arm

Delivering CSS has been a milestone achievement for Arm, and 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. Arm CSS represents the beginning of a new era of custom silicon for infrastructure, and an expansion of the Arm Neoverse portfolio that will empower our ecosystem with trusted compute subsystems that allow them to focus on differentiation and innovation. The momentum we’ve seen for Arm Neoverse designs in the last few years is redefining the infrastructure, and with CSS, we’re providing more partners the opportunity to create a custom-built infrastructure on Arm.


Additional resources:

• Neoverse Compute Subsystems the Fastest Path to Production Silicon
• Arm Neoverse V2 Platform: Best-in-Class Performance/TCO for the Cloud

About Arm

Arm technology is building the future of computing. Our energy-efficient processor designs and software platforms have enabled advanced computing in more than 250 billion chips and our technologies securely power products from the sensor to the smartphone and the supercomputer. Together with 1,000+ technology partners, we are enabling artificial intelligence to work everywhere, and in cybersecurity, we are delivering the foundation for trust in the digital world – from chip to cloud. The future is being built on Arm.