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Arm hires Amazon AI exec to boost plans to build its own chips

Daniel Nenni

Admin
Staff member
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Arm Holdings has hired Amazon.com artificial intelligence chip director Rami Sinno to bolster its plans to develop its own complete chips, a person familiar with the matter said on Monday.

Sinno was responsible for helping to develop Amazon's homegrown AI chips called Trainium and Inferentia that are designed to help build and run large AI applications.

Rami Sinno, Director of Engineering at Annapurna Labs, poses for a portrait in Austin, Texas, U.S., July 19, 2024. REUTERS/Sergio Flores

Rami Sinno. REUTERS/Sergio Flores · REUTERS / Reuters

Until now, Arm has not built its own chips. Instead, it designs the core architecture and instruction set for processors that it sells to customers. Chip designers like Apple and Nvidia use Arm technology in their chips.

In July, Arm disclosed plans to invest a portion of its profit into building its own chips and other components. CEO Rene Haas discussed the possibility of moving beyond designs and building chiplets - smaller, function-specific versions of a chip that are stitched together - and complete systems.

The company, which is majority-owned by the SoftBank Group, collects royalty payments on the chips its customers sell. Arm-based devices power nearly every smartphone in the world and server chips based on its intellectual property have made significant inroads in the data center market long dominated by Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.

As part of a broad plan to increase its business, Arm has sought to expand beyond supplying crucial chip intellectual property to building its own complete designs.

Reuters first reported on the company's plans outlined in sealed exhibits from a December trial, and its effort to hire executives from rivals in February.

In recent years, Arm has sought to bolster its teams focused on building complete chips and systems. The company has hired Nicolas Dube, an executive from HPE with large-scale systems design experience, and Steve Halter, a chip engineer from Intel and Qualcomm, as part of the effort, the person familiar with the matter said.

Sinno's effort at Amazon was part of the company's effort to design chips that would be cheaper and offer superior performance to Nvidia's graphics processors used for AI work.

 
I am still trying to confirm this but assuming it is true it is a very good thing. Rami spent 5 years at Arm before moving to AWS 6 years ago. I do question the wisdom of Arm competing with customers. RISV-V is gaining traction with many companies in the server market so there are alternatives. Next week is the Hot Chips Conference and there are multiple RISC-V presentations:

Cuzco: A High-Performance RISC-V RVA23 Compatible CPU IP Ty Garibay & Shashank Nemawarkar, Condor Computing

Presto: A RISC-V-Compatible SoC for Unified Multi-Scheme FHE Acceleration over Module Lattice Luchang Lei & Hongyang Jia, Tsinghua University


Intel is also presenting:

Introducing the Next Generation Intel® Xeon® Processor with Efficiency Cores Don Soltis, Intel

Intel Mount Morgan Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) Patrick Fleming, Intel


This is a great conference. 2 of us will be covering some of the keynotes the following week. Exciting times in the semiconductor ecosystem, absolutely.
 
I am still trying to confirm this but assuming it is true it is a very good thing. Rami spent 5 years at Arm before moving to AWS 6 years ago. I do question the wisdom of competing with your customers. RISV-V is gaining traction with many companies in the server market so there is are alternatives. Next week is the Hot Chips Conference and there are multiple RISC-V presentations:

Cuzco: A High-Performance RISC-V RVA23 Compatible CPU IP Ty Garibay & Shashank Nemawarkar, Condor Computing

Presto: A RISC-V-Compatible SoC for Unified Multi-Scheme FHE Acceleration over Module Lattice Luchang Lei & Hongyang Jia, Tsinghua University


Intel is also presenting:

Introducing the Next Generation Intel® Xeon® Processor with Efficiency Cores Don Soltis, Intel

Intel Mount Morgan Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) Patrick Fleming, Intel


This is a great conference. 2 of us will be covering some of the keynotes the following week. Exciting times in the semiconductor ecosystem, absolutely.

Rami Sinno also worked at Intel for 17 years at Intel's xScale/Arm division and for Marvell for another 4 years after Intel sold the xScale division to Marvell.
 
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