Industry Expert Blogs

As a global leader in semiconductor design and silicon intellectual property development and licensing, there is no overstating the importance of Arm’s relationships with our Electronic Design Automation (EDA) partners and the tools they develop that allow our now 30-year-old business to thrive. This close integration is not only important to the broad ecosystem of companies that licenses Arm’s IP, but it is also critical to our core business of IP development. With our global footprint of engineers, we have multiple concurrent design projects running around the clock that require the usage of various EDA tools.

Running these EDA workloads on Arm servers for designing Arm processors is a strategic initiative that we embarked on four years ago by deploying EDA tools on-prem on Arm-based servers. We call this Arm-on-Arm. The expansion of this transition from x86 based EDA tools and workflows to on-prem Arm-based servers to the Arm-based processors in the cloud is now possible due to the availability of these simulation, verification and implementation tooling from our EDA partners.

In this blog, we will highlight the journey of designing Cortex-M55 CPU in production from on-prem to Arm Neoverse based AWS Graviton2 processors. This has increased our overall throughput significantly by reducing cost and scheduling risks for critical projects, with some teams experiencing a 6x improvement. In addition, AWS Graviton2 based Amazon M6g instances provide 36% cost savings and 20% better runtimes compared to the x86 based Amazon M5 instances.