May 29 (Reuters) - Arm Holdings on Wednesday

unveiled new chip blueprints and software tools to help

smartphones handle artificial intelligence tasks, along with

changes to how it delivers those blueprints that could help

speed their adoption.

Arm's technology powered the rise of smartphones and is

increasingly found in PCs and in data centers, where chip

designers have gravitated toward its energy efficiency.

Smartphones remain Arm's biggest single market, where the

company supplies intellectual property to arch rivals such as

Apple ( AAPL ) and Android chip suppliers Qualcomm ( QCOM ) and

MediaTek ( MDTTF ).

On Wednesday, Arm launched new designs for central

processing units (CPUs) that it said are better suited to AI

work and new graphics processing units (GPUs). It will also

provide software tools to make it easier for developers to run

chatbots and other AI code on Arm chips.

But the bigger change is in how those products are sold. In

the past, Arm mostly delivered its technology as either

specifications or abstract designs that chip companies then

needed to turn into a physical blueprint for a chip - which in

turn is no small task when deciding how arrange billions of

transistors, the tiny switches that make up chips.

For the new products, Arm worked with Samsung Electronics Co

Ltd ( SSNLF ) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co ( TSM )

to deliver blueprints of physical designs that are

ready for manufacturing.

Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager of

Arm's client line of business, said Arm is not trying to compete

with its customers. It is instead trying to help them get to

market faster while focusing on other increasingly important

parts of both PC and phone chips, such as a neural processing

units (NPU) that provide the best AI performance.

That part of a chip has become so important that Microsoft ( MSFT )

said its most recent AI features won't work without it. Arm

currently does not supply NPU technology for phones and PCs, and

Bergey the company aims to provide more "done and baked" designs

that chip firms can attach their NPUs to.

"We're combining a platform where these accelerators can be

very tightly coupled," Bergey said.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by

Lincoln Feast.)