Over the past few weeks, the legal dispute between Arm Ltd. and Qualcomm Inc. has been warming up the eyes of the entire tech community. However, as per the latest court filing, Arm could change its licensing strategy and shift its whole business model into a new direction that would benefit the company directly. Currently, the company provides the intellectual property (IP) that chip makers can use and add to designs mixed with other IPs and custom in-house solutions. That is how the world of electronics design (EDA) works and how many companies operate. However, in the Qualcomm-Arm legal battle, Qualcomm's counterclaim has brought new light about Arm's plans for licensing its hardware designs past 2024.

According to Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis, who examined court documents, Arm will reportedly change terms to use its IP where the use of other IP mixed with Arm IP is prohibited. If a chip maker plans to use Arm CPU IP, they must also use Arm's GPU/NPU/ISP/DSP IPs. This would result in devices that utilize every design the UK-based designer has to offer, and other IP makers will have to exclude their designs from the SoC. By doing this, Arm directly stands against deals like the Samsung-AMD deal, where AMD provides RDNA GPU IP and would force Samsung to use Arm's Mali GPU IP instead. This change should take effect in 2025 when every new license agreement has to comply with new rules.

In December of 2021, we covered the appearance of Russia's home-grown Baikal-S processor, which has 48 cores based on Arm Cortex-A75 cores. Today, thanks to the famous chip photographer Fritzchens Fritz, we have the first die shows that show us exactly how Baikal-S SoC is structured internally and what it is made up of. Manufactured on TSMC's 16 nm process, the Baikal-S BE-S1000 design features 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores running at a 2.0 GHz base and a 2.5 GHz boost frequency. With a TDP of 120 Watts, the design seems efficient, and the Russian company promises performance comparable to Intel Skylake Xeons or Zen1-based AMD EPYC processors. It also uses a home-grown RISC-V core for management and controlling secure boot sequences.

Below, you can see the die shots taken by Fritzchens Fritz and annotated details by Twitter user Locuza that marked the entire SoC. Besides the core clusters, we see that a slum of cache connects everything, with six 72-bit DDR4-3200 PHYs and memory controllers surrounding everything. This model features a pretty good selection of I/O for a server CPU, as there are five PCIe 4.0 x16 (4x4) interfaces, with three supporting CCIX 1.0. You can check out more pictures below and see the annotations for yourself.

NVIDIA today expanded the NVIDIA Jetson lineup with the launch of new Jetson Orin Nano system-on-modules that deliver up to 80x the performance over the prior generation, setting a new standard for entry-level edge AI and robotics. For the first time, the NVIDIA Jetson family spans six Orin-based production modules to support a full range of edge AI and robotics applications. This includes the Orin Nano—which delivers up to 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of AI performance in the smallest Jetson form factor—up to the AGX Orin, delivering 275 TOPS for advanced autonomous machines.

Jetson Orin features an NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPU, Arm-based CPUs, next-generation deep learning and vision accelerators, high-speed interfaces, fast memory bandwidth and multimodal sensor support. This performance and versatility empower more customers to commercialize products that once seemed impossible, from engineers deploying edge AI applications to Robotics Operating System (ROS) developers building next-generation intelligent machines.

According to Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis sources, Apple is moving its embedded cores from Arm to RISC-V. In Apple's Silicon designs, there are far more cores than the main ones that power the operating system and end-user applications. For example, embedded cores are present, and there are 30+ in M1 SoCs responsible for all kinds of workloads not related to the operating system. These tasks are usually associated with other functions such as WiFi/BlueTooth, ThunderBolt retiming, touchpad control, NAND chips having their own core, etc. They run their own firmware and power everything around the central cores that run the OS, so the whole SoC functions appropriately.

It appears that a lot of these cores are based on Arm M-series or lower-end A-series IP that Apple is currently looking to replace with RISC-V. Given that a large portion of software runs on the main big.LITTLE configuration, other secondary SoC tasks can migrate to a different ISA like RISC-V, with a small firmware adjustment. Given that these cores can be placed with custom IPs, Apple would save licensing fees if custom RISC-V cores were used. Additionally, developing firmware for these cores at an Apple engineering team size shouldn't be a problem. Of course, we have no information about when these custom cores will appear inside Apple Silicon. Even when they are used, no formal announcement is expected given that the main cores remain to be powered by Arm ISA, with everything else invisible to the end-user.

The demand for data is insatiable, from 5G to the cloud to smart cities. As a society we want more autonomy, information to fuel our decisions and habits, and connection - to people, stories, and experiences.

To address these demands, the cloud infrastructure of tomorrow will need to handle the coming data explosion and the effective processing of evermore complex workloads … all while increasing power efficiency and minimizing carbon footprint. It's why the industry is increasingly looking to the performance, power efficiency, specialized processing and workload acceleration enabled by Arm Neoverse to redefine and transform the world's computing infrastructure.

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced new high-density, Arm-based compute servers for cloud-native applications using Ampere Altra processors that support dual socket configurations with up to 256 CPU cores. The GIGABYTE R-series servers already have unique storage options, and the new servers (R182-P91, R282-P91, and R282-P92) extend the depth of support for NVMe (Gen4) SSDs on the Arm platform. For scalable, high-density compute, the last new server, H262-P61, also has no thermal limitations, as it can sustain peak, consistent performance by providing optimal airflow. This multi-node H-series server supports eight CPUs, which translates to as many as 1,024 Arm-based CPU cores in a traditional 2U server. Working off the strengths of the latest Arm architecture for System on Chip (SoC) solutions, Ampere Altra and Altra Max processors are now supported in both single and dual-socket configurations by GIGABYTE.

Arm, Intel and NVIDIA have jointly authored a paper describing an 8-bit floating point (FP8) specification and its two variants E5M2 and E4M3 to provide a common interchangeable format that works for both artificial intelligence (AI) training and inference. This cross-industry specification alignment will allow AI models to operate and perform consistently across hardware platforms, accelerating AI software development.

Computational requirements for AI have been growing at an exponential rate. New innovation is required across hardware and software to deliver computational throughput needed to advance AI. One of the promising areas of research to address this growing compute gap is to reduce the numeric precision requirements for deep learning to improve memory and computational efficiencies. Reduced-precision methods exploit the inherent noise-resilient properties of deep neural networks to improve compute efficiency.

During Evercore ISI TMT conference, Intel announced that the company would continue to lose market share, with a possible bounce back in the coming years. According to the latest report, Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger announced that he expects the company to continue to lose its market share to AMD as the competition has "too much momentum" going for it. AMD's Ryzen and EPYC processors continue to deliver power and efficiency performance figures, which drives customers towards the company. On the other hand, Intel expects a competing product, especially in the data center business with Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors, set to arrive in 2023. Pat Gelsinger noted, "Competition just has too much momentum, and we haven't executed well enough. So we expect that bottoming. The business will be growing, but we do expect that there continues to be some share losses. We're not keeping up with the overall TAM growth until we get later into '25 and '26 when we start regaining share, material share gains."

The only down years that are supposed to show a toll of solid competition are 2022 and 2023. As far as creating a bounceback, Intel targets 2025 and 2026. "Now, obviously, in 2024, we think we're competitive. 2025, we think we're back to unquestioned leadership with our transistors and process technology," noted CEO Gelsinger. Additionally, he had a say about the emerging Arm CPUs competing for the same server market share as Intel and AMD do so, stating that "Well, when we deliver the Forest product line, we deliver power performance leadership versus all Arm alternatives, as well. So now you go to a cloud service provider, and you say, 'Well, why would I go through that butt ugly, heavy software lift to an ARM architecture versus continuing on the x86 family?"

The world of semiconductor IP licensing is complex by nature. If you use a company's IP, you must agree to its licensing terms. Today, it is precisely those terms that are being breached in the event of Arm Ltd. filing a lawsuit against one of its biggest customers, Qualcomm. When Qualcomm acquired Nuvia Inc., regarded as one of the best CPU design teams in the industry, it transferred Arm-Nuvia license agreements as its own. It continued the development of Arm IP under Qualcomm's name. This is a standard restriction, as Arm's licensing prohibits these sorts of IP transfers among companies to protect the IP.

As the UK-headquartered company reports: "Because Qualcomm attempted to transfer Nuvia licenses without Arm's consent, which is a standard restriction under Arm's license agreements, Nuvia's licenses terminated in March 2022. Before and after that date, Arm made multiple good faith efforts to seek a resolution. In contrast, Qualcomm has breached the terms of the Arm license agreement by continuing development under the terminated licenses. Arm was left with no choice other than to bring this claim against Qualcomm and Nuvia to protect our IP, our business, and to ensure customers are able to access valid Arm-based products."

Microsoft is reportedly planning to merge its ARM-powered Surface Pro X brand into the main Surface Pro line starting with the upcoming Surface Pro 9. This would see the Surface Pro 9 being offered with the upcoming Microsoft SQ3 processor which is derived from the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3. Microsoft has previously announced a desktop ARM developer kit codenamed "Project Volterra" featuring the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 SoC and a neural processing unit that should offer similar performance. The Surface Pro 9 is also expected to gain 5G connectivity when it is announced alongside updated Surface Studio, and Surface Laptop products in the coming weeks.

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of the latest Azure Virtual Machines featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor. The new virtual machines will be generally available on September 1, and customers can now launch them in 10 Azure regions and multiple availability zones around the world. In addition, the Arm-based virtual machines can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This ability has been in preview and will be generally available over the coming weeks in all the regions that offer the new virtual machines.

Earlier this year, we launched the preview of the new general-purpose Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 and memory optimized Epsv5 Azure Virtual Machine series, built on the Ampere Altra processor. These new virtual machines have been engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads. Since then, hundreds of customers have tested and experienced firsthand the excellent price-performance that the Arm architecture can provide for web and application servers, open-source databases, microservices, Java and.NET applications, gaming, media servers, and more. Starting today, all Azure customers can deploy these new virtual machines using the Azure portal, SDKs, API, PowerShell, and the command-line interface (CLI).

NVIDIA designed the Grace CPU, a processor in the classical sense, to replace the Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC processors it was having to cram into its pre-built HPC compute servers for serial-processing roles, and mainly because those half-a-dozen GPU HPC processors need to be interconnected by a CPU. The company studied the CPU-level limitations and bottlenecks not just with I/O, but also the machine-architecture, and realized its compute servers need a CPU purpose-built for the role, with an architecture that's heavily optimized for NVIDIA's APIs. This, the NVIDIA Grace CPU was born.

This is NVIDIA's first outing with a CPU with a processing footprint rivaling server processors from Intel and AMD. Built on the TSMC N4 (4 nm EUV) silicon fabrication process, it is a monolithic chip that's deployed standalone with an H100 HPC processor on a single board that NVIDIA calls a "Superchip." A board with a Grace and an H100, makes up a "Grace Hopper" Superchip. A board with two Grace CPUs makes a Grace CPU Superchip. Each Grace CPU contains a 900 GB/s switching fabric, a coherent interface, which has seven times the bandwidth of PCI-Express 5.0 x16. This is key to connecting the companion H100 processor, or neighboring Superchips on the node, with coherent memory access.

Qualcomm is a company well known for designing processors going inside a vast majority of smartphones. However, the San Diego company has been making attempts to break out of its vision to focus on smartphones and establish new markets where it could show its potential for efficient processor design. According to Bloomberg's insights, Qualcomm is planning to re-enter the server market and try again to compete in the now very diverse space. In 2014, Qualcomm announced that the company is developing an Arm ISA-based CPU that will target servers and be an excellent alternative for cloud service providers looking at efficient designs called Centriq. Later on, in November of 2017, the company announced the first CPU Centriq 2400, which had 48 custom Falkor cores, six-channel DDR4 memory, and 60 MB of L3 cache.

What happened later is that the changing management of the company slowly abandoned the project, and the Arm CPU market was a bit of a dead-end for many projects. However, in recent years, many companies began designing Arm processors, and now the market is ready for a player like Qualcomm to re-enter this space. With the acquisition of Nuvia Inc., which developed crazy fast CPU IPs under the leadership of industry veterans, these designs could soon see the light of the day. It is reported that Qualcomm is in talks with Amazon's AWS cloud division, which has agreed to take a look at Qualcomm's offerings.

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today became the first-to-market with a dual-socket motherboard, MP72-HB0, that supports up to 256 Arm cores, making it ideal for cloud native workloads. Also, the launch includes two more servers, G242-P35 and G242-P36, to offer up to 120 TB of NVMe (Gen4) storage capacity paired with Ampere Altra or Ampere Altra Max processors. These GPU-centric servers and motherboard will quickly find a home with hyperscaler and cloud workloads. Altra Max processors have predictable high-performance by having a high core count CPU with one thread per core, 128 threads on a monolithic 128-core chip. Multi-socket support and a wealth of PCIe/CCIX lanes make the platform highly scalable. At the same time, there is industry-leading power efficiency/core, which is highly sought after by our customers.

New product alert! In January last year, we launched the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico, our first product built on silicon designed here at Raspberry Pi. At its heart is the RP2040 microcontroller, built on TSMC's 40 nm low-power process, and incorporating two 133 MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ cores, 264kB of on-chip SRAM, and our unique programmable I/O subsystem. Since launch, we've sold nearly two million Pico boards, and RP2040 has found its way into a huge number of third-party products. We always believed that RP2040 was a great fit for commercial and industrial applications, but the global semiconductor shortage has vastly accelerated adoption. With millions of units on hand today, and pipeline in place for tens of millions more, design engineers who have been let down by their current suppliers have a perfect excuse to experiment.

Fast cores, large memory, and flexible interfacing make RP2040 a natural building block for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. But Pico itself has one obvious missing feature for IoT: a method for connecting to the network. Now, this is about to change. Today, we're launching three new members of the Pico family. Raspberry Pi Pico W is priced at $6, and brings 802.11n wireless networking to the Pico platform, while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling. Pico H ($5) and Pico WH ($7) add pre-populated headers, and our new 3-pin debug connector, to Pico and Pico W respectively. Pico H and Pico W are available today; Pico WH will follow in August.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that it is the first major server provider to deliver a new line of cloud-native compute solutions using processors from Ampere. The new HPE solutions provide service providers and enterprises embracing cloud-native development with an agile, extensible, and trusted compute foundation to drive innovation.

Available in Q3 2022, the new HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 server is the first in a series of HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 servers that deliver next-generation compute performance with higher power efficiency using Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max cloud-native processors.

This time last year, I wrote about how digital experiences had never been more important, from personal to business devices - they helped us stay connected and entertained at a time when we needed it most. Compute continues to define our experiences in the modern world, and now these experiences are becoming even more visual.

Smartphones are at the center of our connected lives. From gaming to productivity, through video calling, social media or virtual environments, it is the device that provides us the connection to everyone and everything, in real time. For developers, making these immersive real-time 3D experiences even more compelling and engaging requires more performance. Arm sets the standard for performance and efficient compute, and our latest suite of compute solutions for consumer devices will continue to raise the threshold of what's possible in the mobile market, shaping the visual experiences of tomorrow.

MediaTek today announced the Dimensity 9000+, an enhancement to the company's top-of-the-line 5G smartphone chipset. This new high-end offering delivers a boost in performance over the Dimensity 9000 to make the next generation of flagship smartphones even more powerful and efficient.

The new Dimensity 9000+ system-on-chip (SoC) integrates Arm's v9 CPU architecture with a 4 nm octa-core process, combining one ultra-Cortex-X2 core operating at up to 3.20 GHz (compared to 3.05 GHz with the Dimensity 9000) with three super Cortex-A710 cores and four efficiency Cortex-A510 cores. The advanced CPU architecture and Arm Mali-G710 MC10 graphics processor built into the new chipset provide more than a 5% boost in CPU performance and more than 10% improvement in GPU performance.

With the launch of Apple Silicon for Mac computers, Apple has established itself as a great user of the Arm instruction set. Starting with M1, the company released an entirely new family of products running Apple Silicon. Today, thanks to the research of Strategy Analytics company, we have information that Apple is capturing as much as 90% of the revenue share present in the Arm PC market. The Arm PC market is a tiny subset of the entire PC market, mainly equipped with one-off Windows-on-Arm devices, Chromebook PCs, and Apple Macs. With the naturally low prices of the remaining Arm PCs, Apple Arm PCs offer a relatively high price point and a much more incredible selection of products.

On the global scale, Arm PCs now account for 9% of the total PC market share, where x86 vendors are dominating the field. "Apple's M-series family of processors set the benchmark and gave Apple a 2-3-year lead over the rest of the Arm-based PC processor vendors. Qualcomm captured just 3% revenue share in the Arm-based notebook PC processor market in 2021 and lags Apple in CPU performance," said Sravan Kundojjala, Director of Handset Component Technologies service at Strategy Analytics. This points to a particular case of Apple's better product and feeding the demand with higher-performing processors. Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia should yield different results in the coming years, as the new IP is yet to appear in Qualcomm SoCs.

Apple M1 chips are a part of the Apple Silicon family that represents a new transition to Arm-based cores with new power and performance targets for Apple devices. A portion of building a processor is designing its security enclave, and today we have evidence that M1 processors got a new vulnerability. The PACMAN is a hardware attack that can bypass Pointer Authentication (PAC) on M1 processors. Security researchers took an existing concept of Spectre and its application in the x86 realm and now applied it to the Arm-based Apple silicon. PACMAN exploits a current software bug to perform pointer authentication bypass, which may lead to arbitrary code execution.

The vulnerability is a hardware/software co-design that exploits microarchitectural construction to execute arbitrary codes. PACMAN creates a PAC Oracle to check if a specific pointer matches its authentication. It must never crash if an incorrect guess is supplied and the attack brute-forces all the possible PAC values using the PAC Oracle. To suppress crashes, PAC Oracles are delivered speculatively. And to learn if the PAC value was correct, researchers used uArch side channeling. In the CPU resides translation lookaside buffers (TLBs), where PACMAN tries to load the pointer speculatively and verify success using the prime+probe technique. TLBs are filled with minimal addresses required to supply a particular TLB section. If any address is evicted from the TLB, it is likely a load success, and the bug can take over with a falsely authenticated memory address.

NVIDIA today announced that Taiwan's leading computer makers are set to release the first wave of systems powered by the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchip for a wide range of workloads spanning digital twins, AI, high performance computing, cloud graphics and gaming. Dozens of server models from ASUS, Foxconn Industrial Internet, GIGABYTE, QCT, Supermicro and Wiwynn are expected starting in the first half of 2023. The Grace-powered systems will join x86 and other Arm-based servers to offer customers a broad range of choice for achieving high performance and efficiency in their data centers.

"A new type of data center is emerging—AI factories that process and refine mountains of data to produce intelligence—and NVIDIA is working closely with our Taiwan partners to build the systems that enable this transformation," said Ian Buck, vice president of Hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA. "These new systems from our partners, powered by our Grace Superchips, will bring the power of accelerated computing to new markets and industries globally."

MediaTek today announced the Filogic 880 and Filogic 380 Wi-Fi 7 platform solutions for high-bandwidth applications in the operator, retail, enterprise and consumer electronics markets. This pair of chips will be among the first Wi-Fi 7 solutions to hit the market, allowing device makers to deliver cutting-edge products with the latest connectivity technology. Filogic 880 is a complete platform that combines a Wi-Fi 7 access point with a new advanced host processor solution to provide the industry's best router and gateway solution for operator, retail and enterprise markets. It offers a scalable architecture that can support up to penta-band 4x4 with a maximum speed of 36 Gbps. Filogic 380 is designed to bring Wi-Fi 7 connectivity to all client devices, including smartphone, tablet, TVs, notebooks, set-top boxes and OTT streaming devices. The chip's dual concurrent 2x2 capability will be optimized "out-of-the-box" for these devices as MediaTek also supplies the corresponding platform solutions. This helps to streamline the design process, maximize performance and accelerate time-to-market.

"Our wireless connectivity solutions are designed to deliver the fastest performance using the most advanced technologies, and represent MediaTek's commitment to drive Wi-Fi 7 adoption in a large number of new markets," said Alan Hsu, corporate vice president and general manager of the Intelligent Connectivity business at MediaTek. "With Filogic 880 and Filogic 380, our customers can deliver fast, reliable and always-on connected experiences to meet the industry's growing connectivity demands." MediaTek's Filogic 880 combines a Wi-Fi 7 access point with a powerful application processor and network processing unit (NPU) to support maximum Wi-Fi, Ethernet and packet processing performance. The chip offers a wide range of interfaces and peripherals, making it easy to customize designs for various end products and applications.

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced a new supercharged, scalable server, G492-PD0, that supports an Ampere Altra Max or Altra processor with NVIDIA HGX A100 Tensor Core GPUs for the highest performance in cloud infrastructure, HPC, AI, and more. Leveraging Ampere's Altra Max CPU with a high core count, up to 128 Armv8.2 cores per socket with Arm's M1 core, the G492-PD0 delivers high performance efficiently and with minimized total cost of ownership.

GIGABYTE developed the G492-PD0 in response to a demand for high-performing platform choices beyond x86, namely the Arm-based processor from Ampere. This new G492 server was tailored to handle the performance of NVIDIA's baseboard accelerator without compromising or throttling CPU or GPU performance. This server joins the existing line of GIGABYTE G492 servers that support the NVIDIA HGX A100 8-GPU baseboard on the AMD EPYC platform (G492-ZL2, G492-ZD2, G492-ZD0) and Intel Xeon Scalable (G492-ID0).

Nintendo could release its next-generation handheld game console, a successor to the crazy-popular Switch, by 2024. This could be powered by an NVIDIA-sourced SoC. NVIDIA recently put up a job listing for a "Game Console Developer Tools Engineer," looking for talent designing the software development applications for the next-generation console. Nintendo is a long-standing customer of NVIDIA chips for its handheld consoles. The next-gen SoC could implement an NVIDIA-designed Arm CPU, and a highly efficient GPU based on the NVIDIA graphics architecture of the time.

Russia has been dealt yet another blow to its technological capabilities, as countries around the world engage in an economic war against the nation following its invasion of Ukraine back in February. The UK government has recently added two major chip-design Russian companies, Baikal Electronics and MCST (Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies) to its sanctioned entity list, meaning that these companies are no longer able to acquire ARM licensing for its homegrown chips. The move is just another in a series of coordinated (and uncoordinated) sanctions.

According to a note provided by the UK government, the aim of the sanctions is to curb Russia's access to devices that could support its war efforts in Ukraine while propping-up the country's degrading technological infrastructure. This effectively shuts the door for Russia to solicit manufacturing from foundries outside its own territory. And even if Russia elected to manufacture its ARM-based designs in-country, thus skirting sanction-respecting foundries, the country's chip manufacturing is currently thought to only be capable of manufacturing chips at a 90 nm process - which the Western world has moved on from since 2006 already.