ARM creates artificial intelligence group

ARM announced the creation of a new unit that will focus on artificial intelligence. Exact details about what the chip designer's machine learning group will work on are unknown, but they will be involved in the creation of accelerator cores, blocks for its CPU and GPU cores and software to speed up AI tasks.

EE Times points out the chip designer has its plate full as analysts believe ARM could be three years behind companies like Cadence, Ceva and Synopsys:

Analysts suggest ARM could be as much as three years behind products from rivals such as Cadence, Ceva and Synopsys. ARM counters it’s still early days for emerging markets where software is rapidly evolving, and lots of AI tasks are already running on its exiting cores.

ARM declined to share the number of people or budget for the group, run by ARM fellow Jem Davies, best known for a decade working on ARM’s media blocks. Rene Haas, president of ARM’s intellectual property group, defined it simply as “a big team in hardware and software.”

“It’s clear we will do [machine learning] in CPUs, GPUs and special purpose cores, but we are not announcing anything yet,” Davies said in a brief one-on-one after a press event at the ARM Tech Con here.