• Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: META) unveiled a new set of free software tools for artificial intelligence applications helping developers smoothly switch between different underlying chips.

• Meta's software would help to quickly swap between chips without being locked in, Reuters reports.

• Meta's new open-source AI platform is based on an open-source machine learning framework called PyTorch.

• It can help code run up to 12 times faster on NVIDIA Corp's (NASDAQ: NVDA) flagship A100 chip or up to four times faster on Advanced Micro Devices Inc's (NASDAQ: AMD) MI250 GPU systems.

• Also Read: US Offers Relaxations To Nvidia For AI Chip Development In China

• But just as important as the speed boost is the flexibility the software can provide, the report added.

• The software has become a key battleground for chipmakers seeking to build up an ecosystem of developers to use their chips.

• CUDA, NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture, has been the most popular so far for artificial intelligence work.

• The unified GPU back-end support gives deep learning developers more hardware vendor choices with minimal migration costs, Meta said.

• In March, Qualcomm Inc (NASDAQ: QCOM) courted Meta to make Facebook's owner the flagship customer for Qualcomm's first AI data center chip, the AI 100.

• Meta questioned whether the software that accompanied the chip was mature enough to wring the best performance from the chip on future tasks.

• Meta decided to stick with its existing chips as it evaluated its options.

• Price Action: META shares closed higher by 2.16% at $138.61 on Monday.

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