As CES 2025 is about to begin, Arm has made predictions for technological development in 2025. It believes that chip design will still dominate computing power development, while artificial intelligence technology will continue to grow and "recalibrate" Moore's Law. At the same time, mobile phones will remain the focus of market development, but will also drive market development in more areas.
Small chip design brings more flexibility
Specifically, chip design will be reconsidered, with chiplet design becoming a key focus. This will overcome the cost and physical limitations of traditional tape-out chip design. It will also allow for greater flexibility in chip design by combining different process technologies, component integration, application design, or memory combinations.
As chip designs are readjusted, Moore's Law, previously proposed, will also be "recalibrated." It will no longer be limited to the previous focus on doubling chip performance and halving power consumption each year, but will instead focus more on performance per watt, performance per unit area, performance per unit power consumption, and total cost of ownership as core indicators.
Furthermore, the new chip design is expected to introduce more new metrics to ensure that overall performance will not be compromised after the technology is integrated into the system-on-chip and the entire system. Furthermore, future chip development will also cater to diverse needs, offering differentiated designs for different computing subsystems that meet specific computing requirements, thereby allowing more customized chips to enter the market.
As demand for chiplets and customized chip designs increases, the development of standardized platforms and design frameworks becomes increasingly important. Therefore, Arm is currently collaborating with over 50 industry partners to promote the Chiplet System Architecture (CSA). This will help standardize chiplet design and foster a larger market ecosystem.
Artificial intelligence has become a driving force for the development of many markets
As for the development of artificial intelligence, Arm believes that artificial intelligence will not replace engineers, but will become an auxiliary tool for increasingly complex chip design and will accelerate the development of chip design and corresponding solutions.
At the same time, we expect to see more growth in AI inference applications, and AI technology deployed at the edge will also grow significantly, thereby promoting the development of hybrid AI architectures and achieving decentralized AI technology applications. In addition, there will also be a significant growth trend in small natural language models (SLMs), thereby responding to the demand for faster and more suitable AI development for edge devices.
However, large-scale natural language models like GPT-4 will continue to advance, and AI technology will be developed to understand more input content, enabling AI to hear, see, and understand more. Meanwhile, AI agent applications will gradually become mainstream, using AI to assist with specific daily tasks. Even the medical field will become a key area of AI application.
The development of artificial intelligence applications will become more powerful, intuitive and intelligent, such as promoting smarter artificial intelligence assistant services and digital medical diagnosis applications. At the same time, responses will no longer be limited to providing single, simple answers, but will provide more complete answers based on different user questions through automatic generation technology.
The development of artificial intelligence is accompanied by safety regulations and green electricity development
As AI technology grows and becomes more widely used, the amount of data generated will increase significantly. Therefore, both the industry and government agencies will need to develop safer regulations and oversight methods to ensure the safe use of AI technology. Power will also become a key focus of AI development, including how to reduce carbon emissions, minimize power loss, and increase the use of green electricity. Furthermore, how to make AI operate more efficiently and integrate heterogeneous computing designs will become the focus of future development.
With the development of artificial intelligence technology, the development model of prototyping through virtualization will also become the mainstream method in the market, thereby promoting the accelerated development of future chip design, saving chip design time and costs, and enabling more market applications to grow faster, such as the automotive market and the development of autonomous driving applications.
Smart glasses won’t replace mobile phones
Finally, Arm emphasized that smartphones will remain an important consumer electronics product for decades to come, meaning they won't be replaced by computing devices like smart glasses anytime soon. Laptops will also continue to be the preferred choice for work, but the development of smart glasses will undoubtedly become a future trend, creating a new information interaction experience.
