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Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA
- rwmj 17d agoIt's Arm based, although they barely mention that.
- thebeardisred 17d agoThanks I was, of course, looking and very curious what their tool chain story will be.
- runmanny 17d ago[dead]
- minimeow 17d agoYes the lack of transparency on ARM architecture and the obfuscation of the RAM capacity with just the slot information is annoying. Not sure if it is deliberate to sell this at a premium to "mainframe" customers or whether its just their marketing folk not being on the ball. Fascinated by the fact Japan has a 2nm process node but I suspect that too is marketing. Perhaps the 2nm portion of the chip is done at TSMC and the rest of the package done in Japan or something like that. It's not like there's a plethora of 2nm Fabs around the planet to choose from.
- imtringued 17d agoIt looks to me like it is an AI optimized HPC CPU and while HPC CPUs are actually quite fast, they are not particularly well suited for transformer based neural networks. It's weird that they don't give out any of the interesting numbers like number of memory channels, how much SRAM they have (CPUs tend to have more of it) or what their expected performance is going to be.
- adrian_b 17d agoThey did a detailed presentation at Hot Chips. See e.g.: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/hot-chips-2026-fujitsus-monaka-cpu https://chipsandcheese.com/p/hot-chips-2026-fujitsus-monaka-... They have provided far more details than companies like Apple or Qualcomm.
- imtringued 16d agoLooks good for HPC but the AI performance is only good against other CPUs. Even Intel GPUs can beat the quoted numbers within that power envelope.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- whizzter 17d agoReading of JASM (TSMC/Sony subsidiary) it seems they're planning on producing at least 3nm chips there in their expansion plans.
- nubinetwork 17d agoIf they didn't mention SVE2, I wouldn't have known either... that would make it arm9 at the earliest...
- a012 17d agoQuick Google result is it’s basically a Neoverse V2 system, so yeah, armv9. Edit: it’s funny because this article from 2021 mentioned Fujisu precisely https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/30/arm-unveils-armv9-architecture-next-generation-processor-chips/ https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/30/arm-unveils-armv9-archit...
- voxelghost 17d agoThat was regarding the HPC Fugaku , this is next generation
- adrian_b 17d agoNo it is not at all Neoverse V2, which is obsolete and has much lower performance. It is a custom Armv9.3-A design (same ISA like the Arm C1 CPUs from the flagship smartphones of 2026), but it has double-width execution units for SVE2 (i.e. 256-bit width, vs. 128-bit for the other Arm CPUs) and it has some ISA extensions for AI/ML, e.g. instructions for inference with FP8 (BF16 is already supported by the standard Arm ISA). Despite the fact that Armv9.3-A may include SME (scalable matrix extension, like in the Apple CPUs and in the Arm C1 CPUs), Fujitsu did not mention SME, so I assume that they did not implement it and they rely on their enhanced SVE2 (which is not surprising, while the origin of Arm SME is at Apple, the origin of Arm SVE is at Fujitsu).
- my123 17d agoMonaka-X will include SME2 but it didn't make the cut for first-gen Monaka
- titzer 17d agoThey actually do not in that article. I had to look elsewhere to find that out. Weird, one would expect that a big announcement like this would probably need to be vetted against licensing agreements with Arm that would probably want that fact to be prominently highlighted in press releases.
- shrubble 17d agoInteresting to note that Fujitsu did this when the SPARC architecture was popular: they enhanced/developed a CPU for the same ABI. Seems they have decided they don’t want to create their own architecture, but take the popular architecture and build on it.
- qmarchi 17d agoThanks kinda how Japan works. Inventing something new is hard, but taking something that's a cool idea and making it actually usable is well within their wheelhouse. See: - Blue LEDs - Quartz Watches - Lithium-ion Batteries - Bidets
- whizzter 17d agoI'm sure there's plenty of other stuff invented in Japan, but that's really beside the point. The industry is now mature enough that nobody really wants the headache of a new architecture at this point in time, Risc-V got a pass for being a grassroots movement growing out off FPGA's since the IP situation was more or less clear or even predatory with all existing architectures, Power, Sparc,SuperH,68k,etc are buried for good reasons.
- 6SixTy 17d agoUC Berkeley developed RISC-V, so no doubt their influence within the computer science academia sphere had something to do with it.
- whizzter 16d agoDunno, I think Risc-V's simplicity gave it the initial popularity rush rather than being from a certain institution (the institution perhaps gave it visibility, but it does have own merits and no idea if other archs from the time had those?), don't remembere exactly but iirc it was possible to implement with a ridiculously small amount of FPGA gates. Conversly heard some rumblings that it had parts t hat were unsuitable for scaling up but it seems to have gained enough momentum for people to engineer past stuff like that.
- mrweasel 17d agoNot mentioning the architecture is rather strange. Being Fujitsu I'd expect SPARC, but apparently not. Maybe we're reaching a point where some circles either don't care or just defaults to ARM? Obviously they can just ignore the license in the future and continue development out of a local branch, but it's also a bit disingenuous to speak of "sovereign infrastructure" and then use licensed processor design.
- formerly_proven 17d agoFujitsu dropped SPARC for HPC ~seven years ago with their A64fx. That's where ARM SVE comes from in the first place.
- mrweasel 16d agoI feel old now.
- FlowingRiver 16d agoIt think we are now heading towards the final long term ISA setup. x86 and ARM at the top, ARM in the middle and RISC-V for smaller embedded machines that don't need the ARM toolchain.
- snvzz 16d agoActual long term ISA setup: RISC-V for everything.
- pertymcpert 17d agoYes but it's their own design, not licensing Arm cores.
- Animats 17d agoThanks. Looked for that in the article and couldn't find it. What are the GPU capabilities?
- numpad0 17d agoLikely none? I believe they just don't give graphics out to non-x86 servers. If you mean GPU as in SIMD processor, I believe this is supposed to have it in forms of massive SIMD capabilities on CPU itself.
- FlowingRiver 16d agoThese things feel like, if they have any video output, it would be a single VGA port for if you REALLY need to get a signal from it.
- numpad0 16d agox86 servers are like that. PC/AT memory map have the range for VRAM, but RS232C is optional, so you can't just have the RS232C and not VGA on an x86 as its debug/recovery interface. Platform designers can make up their own memory maps, so non-x86 ones can just have UART I/O buffer and hardware interface wired up in whatever address you want and forgo VGA. I have a 32bit SPARC machine on a shelf I got from a junk hardware shop, it has a DB25 for console. It's ok.
- gpderetta 17d agoFujitsu has a long history of designing their own micro but using a standard ISA for HPC. Used to be SPARC, now it is ARM. IIRC Fujitsu were the main architects behind the SVE ARM extension.
- amelius 17d agoBut Arm is owned by SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate. (I think Japanese sovereignty is the main point of the article.)
- sherujgr 17d agoIam very curious as to how well it'll perform outside of Asia.
- alightsoul 17d agoFun fact, Fujitsu used to run their own fabs in Japan until they were sold to UMC and now they're another UMC fab although they are stuck at like the 20nm node. So this is likely made at JASM.
- iicc 17d agoI think they'd say if the CPU was fabbed in Japan, instead there's some very "careful" wording: >next-generation CPU, FUJITSU-MONAKA [1], designed and developed in Japan >Fujitsu MONAKA Server, powered by the FUJITSU-MONAKA CPU, enhances sovereign capabilities through domestic manufacturing,
- iicc 17d ago>FUJITSU-MONAKA utilizes a 3D-stacked architecture with a state-of-the-art 2nm process for the core and a 5nm process for the cache and I/O sections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Advanced_Semiconductor_Manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Advanced_Semiconductor_M... >The Phase 2 factory was under construction as of January 2025, next to the Phase 1 facility, and is expected to be completed by 2027.[3] Initially planned for manufacturing semiconductors using a 6 nm process, 3 nm was incorporated into production plans for 2028 in 2026
- kennywinker 17d agoRight below the headline it says: > Achieving world-class AI inference performance through Japan-developed 2nm 3D-stacked CPU and server integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan Sounds pretty clear to me
- Youden 17d agoWhere are the CPUs fabbed? They make a big deal about "sovereign" but is the CPU actually made in Japan, or do they rely on TSMC? Also odd how big an emphasis they put on AI inference when they don't build the GPU?
- Max-q 17d agoThe article says that it’s manufactured in Japan.
- ranger_danger 17d agowhere exactly does it say that? I don't consider "designed and developed in Japan" to be the same as manufactured there
- bradyd 17d agoAt the very top of the article: "Achieving world-class AI inference performance through Japan-developed 2nm 3D-stacked CPU and server integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan"
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- sgerenser 17d ago"Japan-developed CPU..." plus the server itself (parts, power supplies, case, etc.) integrated, developed and manufactured in Japan. It sounds like they're weasel-wording it a bit, but I don't think the CPU itself is manufactured in Japan, only "developed."
- tecleandor 17d agoYep. I'd say the CPU is manufactured outside, and the rest of the server in Japan.
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- redlewel 17d agoWould be cool to get ahold of one of these in the US. I do find it odd that the 2U model has less storage capacity than the 1U on their chart. That doesn't make much sense to me.
- 10729287 17d agoThe two made-in-Japan, premium grade, Fujitsu laptops I had to work with were by far the worse pieces of electronic I have ever used. Both exhibited identical defects: fans running continuously at maximum speed, and the batteries would completely die within hours of the devices being powered off. Windows or Linux. And don't talk about that tiny unresponsive trackpad to me. Never again.
- dijit 17d agoThe Fujitsu Lifebooks were legendary for their robustness back in the day, I'm genuinely sad you had that experience. The only fujitsu laptops I used was back in 2011- it was a budget version for on-call and it was fine.. Sounds like the fans running 100% probably contributed significantly to the issue here. If I had to guess it was likely that the C-States were disabled in BIOS somehow so the CPU clock was running at full tilt the whole time, maybe combined with a bad thermal paste job. I'm not here to defend Fujitsu but I've had really bad experiences with basically every major laptop brand (Dell: majorly bad coil whine and especially faulty soldered RAM, HP: keys vanishing from the keyboard and very weak hinges that break all the time, Apple: The GPU unsoldering itself and the butterfly keyboard shenanigans). I don't really know any brand with a flawless track record sadly. Before anyone brings up Thinkpads, they're trading on a reputation that hasn't been true for over a decade. If you have fond memories of a thinkpad it's most likely that you had it from before 2016, or it's "fine", but certainly not great.
- nhubbard 17d agoI do recall that Fujitsu had a very... unique approach to exposing the Setup option in their firmware. It was just a UEFI boot entry. If that entry was removed, you couldn't get back into the firmware setup; you had to find the name of the setup EFI file and then run that from the EFI console.
- dwroberts 17d agoTheir consumer electronics arm is completely unrelated and also majority owned by Lenovo
- pipes 17d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal Their software is so poor that it caused probably the biggest miscarriage of justice in history. Well that and Fujitsu staff colluding with post office executives to put innocent people in prison rather than admit there was a problem
- varispeed 17d agoI wouldn't trust that this CPU can do maths properly.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- Maken 17d agoThe 'Fujitsu' that made the shitty software was a British consulting company that was acquired by Fujitsu [1] to farm public contracts. This is made by the Japanese parent company. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limite...
- nisegami 17d agoYou're right, but the scandal is so upsetting that I personally cannot ever look at Fujitsu the same way even. Also, I think you're neglecting that a large part of why it became so bad was that Fujitsu claimed there was no issue with their software. Even if it were built by a company they acquired, the response to the developing situation was something that the parent company should have stepped in to oversee.
- varispeed 17d agoIt is ultimately Fujitsu responsibility.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
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- varispeed 17d agoNever buy products of this dodgy company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
- kittikitti 17d agoI think what's most notable about this for me is the reduced environmental impact. The specifications list liquid-cooling as optional and it highlights the CPU as the main processor instead of a power hungry GPU. My takeaway is that the next generation of AI HPC's will focus more heavily on sustainable operations.
- drob518 17d agoOne problem we’re going to have with AI hardware is coming up with a standard set of specifications that are comparable. I don’t really care about the CPU GHz and the memory bandwidth, at least not directly. What I really want to know is how many tokens per second this will deliver, but that also depends on the model. We need a standard metric for that. Perhaps we agree on a specific open weight model (e.g. GLM 5.3 Flash or Qwen vWhatever) and then measure TPS on the hardware of interest.
- swiftcoder 17d ago> I don’t really care about the CPU GHz and the memory bandwidth ... What I really want to know is how many tokens per second this will deliver There is a fairly direct link between the two numbers. You can predict the latter from former reasonably well
- michaelbuckbee 17d agoI feel like even TPS is becoming less of a good metric as we're seeing certain models handle similar problems while burning far fewer tokens.
- julius 17d agoI always heard of GB/s as most important number ... AI told me their 8800 MT/s on 8 Byte, 12 DDR5-Channels means 845 GB/s. A Nvidia RTX 4090 has 1008 GB/s. Nvidia B200 has 8000 GB/s. Is this the right way of looking at it?
- hermitShell 17d agoYou have to load the model weights into VRAM over PCI-E (from RAM). So the (PCI-E) bandwidth strongly affects time to first token. You have to run inference on the GPU by reading and writing to VRAM. So TFLOPS of the compute matters, and bandwidth to the VRAM (Always integrated with the GPU, rarely a bottleneck), and this strongly affects tokens/s If you're doing training workloads or offloading to system RAM, it gets more complicated. (And mostly bound up trying to feed compute on time) (Edits for clarity.)
- lucaslazarus 17d agoWow a corporate TLD in a wild, never seen this outside of the erstwhile domains.google
- r_lee 17d agothere's quite a few like: - home.kpmg - global.honda and probably more I forgot about but as you can see, they're pretty terrible for replacing .com domains
- varispeed 17d agoFunny they have money to buy TLD or even develop such a fancy CPU, but don't have money to compensate people affected by Post Office scandal.
- hermitShell 17d agoI fail to see how they will take a significant market share or even break even on this venture. It's an overcrowded market. Far better would be to focus on semiconductor supply chain, which Japan already supplies some elements, to sell to fabs. Because the bottleneck is the fabs. If a new 2 nm fab came online today, it would immediately sell all its capacity to 2030 no problem, without Fujitsu trying this gambit. It's not 'sovereign', the architecture is not designed in Japan, the silicon is not fabbed in Japan. This whole thing is sideways.
- Daishiman 17d ago> I fail to see how they will take a significant market share or even break even on this venture. Doesn't matter. You have to start somewhere and this is a good start.
- formerly_proven 17d agoJapan historically behaves as if they have nukes and need a totally sovereign HPC capability to support their stockpile.
- pertymcpert 17d agoIt's a custom Fujitsu micro-architecture.
- 0x457 17d agoIt's ARM with extensions.
- numpad0 17d agoPrevious generation of this was a monstrosity based on a custom SPARC with ARM front end grafted on top, supporting the version of SPARC extensions they created backported to ARM as a new extension. So there's a good chance that it's still an optimized half-SPARC inside.
- broken-kebab 17d ago>the architecture is not designed in Japan The text says "next-generation CPU, FUJITSU-MONAKA, designed and developed in Japan".
- vondur 17d agoEvery developed country is going to push for their own homemade chips. Japan used to make Sparc CPU's back in the day. Probably many others I'm not aware of.
- nullbio 17d agoEvery developed country except Australia, perhaps. This government is atrocious. The record for highest number of bureaucrats per capita in the world is owned by Australia. All they know how to do is tax people. All the wealthy people have left, or are leaving.
- vouwfietsman 17d ago> The record for highest number of bureaucrats per capita in the world is owned by Australia You have been convinced by fake news, please recheck this claim, its false. > wealthy people *rich people > All they know how to do is tax people Oh god you're one of those. People who complain about taxes have historically been on the wrong side of arguments.
- GlacierFox 17d ago> Oh god you're one of those. People who complain about taxes have historically been on the wrong side of arguments. Oh you're one of those. The arrogance is astounding. You never been a country which overly taxes it's citizens and squanders the gains on bureaucracy and monetary black holes? Grow up, your ideological blind spots are making you look like a fool.
- vouwfietsman 14d agoPerfectly describes Australia, indeed. Note how I'm not saying that taxes should be higher and should be "squandered on bureaucracy and monetary black holes", so I'm not sure if I really am one of those. The world is not black and white, contrary to popular belief.
- numpad0 17d ago
- zackmorris 17d agoI've been calling for high-multicore CPUs (at least 100 cores) with local memories for a quarter century now. No winners so far. A Pentium 4 hit 3.8 GHz longer than that ago in 2004, so that's not special. And the estimated price will be $7,000-10,000, which isn't special either since that's about 10x more than it should be. Hot take: GPUs disrupted the CPU industry to such a degree that CPUs never recovered, and like the k-shaped economy, the current status quo only serves a small fraction of customers. We can and should do better, but sadly we won't. Still, it's good that Fujitsu did this, for the competition if nothing else.
- pjmlp 17d agoUnless they are used for multi-processing in classical UNIX fashion, or proper microkernels, most applications will hardly take advantage of them. Managed languages runtimes are probably the ones that would be better equipped to take advantage of them, for distributed JIT, GC and asynchronous code. The Connection Machine style with StarLisp. Very few devs can write optimal multi-threaded code that explores the single digit count of cores on their laptops or phones already.
- senderista 17d agoIMO we are still far from discovering a truly usable concurrency paradigm (if one even exists).
- pjmlp 17d agoMaybe if designing software like digital circuits, which are more parallel in execution. However one could argue that FPGAs are already that, and still we come back to a skill issue. I am also not an expert, cannot make heads or tails about SIMD algorithms, and in what GPUs goes, only traditional shading languages. Let alone algorithms that on top of that, should take optimal advantage of all available CPUs.
- zackmorris 17d agoYa functional programming is key, as it's equivalent to a spreadsheet or digital circuit. In other words, it removes the element of time and often dynamic state, which imperative programming generally fails to do. IMHO most concurrency problems don't actually need async behavior, they need higher-order methods and models which behave deterministically by encapsulating async behavior internally. Another maturing solution is to use SAT solvers to prove that all exceptional behavior and failure modes are handled. I'm hopeful that AI will help with that and allow us to exercise programs fully, rather than rely on unit tests and fuzzing. Personally I think that the UNIX model of orchestrating small async programs that do one thing well is the only proven mainstream solution. Erlang and Go come really close, but unfortunately we need a hybrid of the two, which doesn't currently exist. The pattern for that is functional core, imperative shell. Which mimics the real world where business logic can be formerly proven correct or constrained by types and categories, then we wire up programs cookie cutter style. That avoids the use of monads (promises/futures in imperative languages), which are the main footguns. The closest language that does that is ClojureScript, whose runtime is analogous to suspending and resuming a coroutine or green thread that makes Lisp calls (although that's a poor fit and I'm sure I'm wrong about it). But you're right that we don't currently have a language that can recruit multicore CPUs. I used MATLAB/GNU Octave in the past, but think that Julia probably has a brighter future since it can already run on GPU mostly unmodified. I would not try to do it with a mainstream language like C# or Python, or even PHP for that matter. Although some of PHP's multiprocessing metaphors are pretty solid, since they intentionally use processes instead of threads like in Ruby. There the problem is latency introduced by poor process models used by Microsoft and Apple, not something fundamental with spawning processes. Real-time Linux attempts to unify the kernel under one process model to provide deterministic timing, which is hard enough for regular Linux and probably out of reach of the big OS companies, because money can't buy everything.
- a11r 17d agoBack in 2008 Fujitsu has one of the best performing 10Gbps Switches. We were building 40 Gbps packet sniffers at Google (4x 10 Gbps NICs) and needed switches that could do things like mirror traffic across ports at line rate. Fujitsu was way ahead of the pack. I always wondered what held them back from building a meaningful networking business in the US.
- calmworm 17d ago[flagged]
- HPsquared 17d agoThe other sort of network, ironically.
- filoleg 17d agoDo you mind elaborating? This is the first time ever I am hearing of Fujitsu being involved in any bribing/lobbying controversy in the US (whether as a victim or an offender), and I doubt I am the only user in this thread in this position. Unless it is a very well-known controversy, I feel like there is a need for extra context here. I am not even asking for anything of the "proof beyond any reasonable doubt" nature, I simply want to understand what you are trying to reference.
- calmworm 16d agoI wasn’t referencing anything specific, but a general response to how/why many companies can’t or won’t do business in the United States.
- protocolture 16d ago>I wasn’t referencing anything specific, but a general response to how/why many companies can’t or won’t do business in the United States. Its a genuinely terrible place to do business, and its full of genuinely terrible people to do business with. Oh and Trump made it a bit worse with Tariffs I guess. Hope this helps.
- geye1234 17d agoWill it lock up thousands of innocent self-employed post office contractors as part of its instruction set? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
- tristor 17d agoProbably not, Japanese firms excel at hardware and generally build extremely poor software. This a hardware product, so consequently it is probably fairly good.
- seki285 17d agoWhat caused this?
- tristor 17d agoHonestly, no idea. In my career I have worked with a lot of Japanese firms and have always found their engineers to be excellent. I used to think it was a lack of consideration for UX, but that obviously can't be true when you see excellent examples of UX in hardware (e.g. Switch controls), even though its exceedingly rare on the software side. If anyone on HN knows (there are several other commenters more deeply steeped in Japanese engineering culture), I would love to know why as well.
- logicchains 17d agoJapanese culture and work culture is very hierarchical/top down. They excel at waterfall but it's basically impossible to do agile in a Japanese office environment, and waterfall is suitable for hardware but terrible for building software.
- naishoya 16d ago＞Japanese culture and work culture is very hierarchical/top down. This, and the 'rise or climb to the top' is more about seniority and social standing than anything else, especially at large Japanese conglomerates. The result us that there are almost none of the software competencies in senior management, and even if there were those would be software competencies from the 1970' and 1980's who are still leading while being 80 years old. There is also a 'filter' put in place at most organizations which are sufficiently large or diverse, such that middle-management is moved across multiple divisions every two or three years during their career. This is presented as a cross-training/cross-competency, but has an effect of preventing those with the most direct contact to the production staff from building enough localized social capital and systemic capability which would enable changes to the workflow not directly from the top. The middle stays in the middle, and the top gets to keep their seat well past any reasonable capability to adapt to the changing world of business. This leads to the situation, where if leadership were changing with incoming capacity and points of view, there would be a motive and opportunity to admit to company errors; such as acquiring an international subsidiary which produced a faulty product that directly harmed people, because the newer leadership could say: "Sorry, that was a series of bad decisions, and as new leadership my role is to correct the course of business operations." However, when the leadership is still the same clique that made the errors in either acquisition, oversight, response to the negative outcomes, then that "Sorry" statement would be a career ending move and result in massive social penalties beyond simply a forced retirement which would have lasting socio-economic impacts on the entire clique's family in every facet of business and later prospects. Combined with the strict social responsibility of a large enough scale of harm could lead to actual, not-figurative, suicide. So, no, there's not going to be any 'mea culpa' for the direct actions of a foreign subsidiary, because those negative outcomes of those poor decisions are not in the direct social awareness in Japan of those surrounding the entrenched leadership and thus do not impact the daily social standing of that clique to the extent that a formal 'taking responsibility' would. Instead, there will be very public announcements of improved capability which has the indirect and implied meaning of: "Engineering a way to make a better product will keep that from happening again" without ever directly addressing the existence of the faults. Social and economic uplift to counter any negative pressure in the local social awareness equals a success, not a failure. In order for Japan to actually become successful at software in the near and medium time-frames, there will need to be a large shift in the work-life balance and internal social structure of new startups. This is beginning to happen in small scale, and to the extent that those newer 'brands' can avoid becoming subsidiaries of the larger established conglomerations will determine the slope to that success. The groups which can empower and embrace a 'star' network topology inside and among organizations instead of 'waterfall' hierarchy will both; struggle to reach the social equity available through corporate-government-financial integration that is strongly entrenched in the established systems, and will outperform those entrenched systems in terms of real productivity through reliable delivery of improved capacity. The socio-economic inertia of the giant keiretsu-gaisha are immense, but the geriatric cliff is already here and the nation and it's business cultures are at an 'adapt or cease operations' threshold. It's questionable whether any of the globally well know names will remain operational in their prior fields of production over the next 50 to 100 years without a significant shift in developing a way to build direct connections to capacity and applied skills at every tier of each company. The 25 to 30 year old employees group in every main workforce is barely a fraction of what it used to be, and handling that small group as if it needs a 'filter' to keep the authority concentrated at the top is a significant risk for these organizations. Those workers at the start of their career who are looking hard at the work-life balance aspect of employment have an inertia which is at odds with that of the organizational behemoths. Many of them are in a position to be drawn out of the crowded city, embrace a rural lifestyle and remote work without the centralized office and it's toxic overwork for underproduction culture. The rural municipalities are developing stronger incentives to attract this mobility, including relocation assistance and direct support with childcare and family building resources. Some prefectures and town offer up to several years of basic food and housing subsidies, low to zero cost fibre internet; next-generation FLET'S Hikari Cross or NTT's eqivalent 10Gbps in a HOUSE instead of a tiny apartment. The major central large conglomerates are going to find that the local in-office work pool will stagnate as the most capable and best informed no longer flow in directly from university and fill every available desk from a waiting list. The "bigs" have insulated the ledger books with massive foreign investments, so they have the capability to stay 'in-the-game' for quite some time, so long as those investments continue to be productive, but the hollowing out of the main offices in Tokyo is pretty much guaranteed in the next two generations as rural Japan's liveability and economics for raising a family continue to grow, because the 80+ hour workweek labor staff in the city has no incentive to pair up and have kids, and the kids who are graduating in this and the next generation's rural school graduates are less and less likely to stay in the city after university if they want a family. It's pretty much Japan's only way out of the population crisis that is still worsening. So, either they will adjust and become a productive, blended high tech semi-rural powerhouse without the high stress office culture that developed in postwar recovery, or they risk becoming a history lesson about over-concentration of inflexible management culture and loss of productivity. The third option: succeed AND keep hyper-concentrated power is dependent on the types of moves that Fujitsu et al. are making today, find a way to automate more and more capacity via Machine Learning and robotics in the hopes of not actually needing an influx of skilled workforce for production. If this 'hail Mary' play actually were to succeed it only cements a productive income for the shrinking population without resolving any of the causes of that shrinkage, i.e. the population still works 80+ hours a week in a socially disconnected state that in antithetic for raising healthy youthful progeny. Taken to an 'in extremis' view: Within another 60 to 80 years, this might result in a well funded country of the elderly being waited on by robot butlers with until there is no one left to be waited on or fed the produce grown in automated fields. I think that he most likely path will be a mixture of all three, in varying measure and with an array of outcomes. We live in interesting times indeed.
- sandreas 17d agoI'm kind of a Fujitsu fanboy. Since i came across the fact that a pretty modern xeon ecc ram nvme Workstation boards can be optimized to only draw ~10 Watt idle is just impressive, that is less than a gaming router. Even older ones like D3417-B12 were crazy effizient. I also liked their Primergy Servers, but never got one for a reasonable price to test it out. Another thing was the Futro series (e.g. S930) that could be used as opnsense firewall or low budget proxmox host. Unfortunately it was always hard to obtain the high quality stuff as a consumer and years ago they sold their mainboard section to kontron. So no new Fujitsu Mainboards for now... What a pity.
- bakar_islem 17d ago[flagged]
- irusensei 17d agoIf anyone is curious and want to skip all the PR talk: >Combined with SVE2 vector operations and software optimization, It’s ARMv9.
- Perz1val 17d agoI wonder how many cores they plan to cram in there, at least like 256 right?
- flumes_whims_ 17d ago144 per the article
- scottchiefbaker 17d ago[dead]
- hulitu 17d agoI hoped it would be SPARC.
- CalChris 17d agoI hoped it would be Alpha.
- officeplant 17d agoI can't believe its not butter
- antonvs 16d agoWhy not 68000
- poulpy123 16d agoI crossed my fingers for a 8087
- 17d ago
- yencabulator 17d agoHere's the previous generation, two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42415754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42415754 And here's more technical information about this generation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49443040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49443040
- numpad0 16d ago> CapeTheory on Dec 14, 2024 > Fujitsu seems to be weirdly stubborn about global commercialisation of their CPUs. I know of at least a couple of HPC customers who wanted to build systems based on A64FX and the answer was basically "...nah we're good". This attitude is seen in a lot of Japanese tech companies and their products over the past multiple decades, and it really irritates me. This, or the root cause of this, has to be one of major reasons why Japanese economy had stagnated, if not the key reason. There had been just so many things created, launched, and ... vanished in the wind.
- qsbuilder 17d agoIf they can’t build real enterprise sales and software support outside Japan, it’s just another cool Arm chip no one can actually buy
- jaen 17d agoMore detailed presentations about the Monaka CPU: wccftech summary: https://wccftech.com/fujitsus-monaka-chip-3d-stacks-2nm-cpu-5nm-sram-dies-monaka-x-eyes-2029-1-4nm-nvlink-fusion/ https://wccftech.com/fujitsus-monaka-chip-3d-stacks-2nm-cpu-... 2026: https://global.fujitsu/-/media/Project/Fujitsu/Fujitsu-HQ/technology/research/events/isc26/fujitsu-isc2026-fujitsu-monaka.pdf?rev=29a544077502430c9297c32c9584053e&hash=3765E844A36C765C7C85EA6917556B04 https://global.fujitsu/-/media/Project/Fujitsu/Fujitsu-HQ/te... 2023: https://global.fujitsu/-/media/Project/Fujitsu/Fujitsu-HQ/technology/research/events/sc23/next-arm-processor-fujitsu-monaka-and-its-technologies.pdf?rev=14b5d074842943da92c8feb406c1e50c&hash=59963ED9B26AAFA22FAAEFA636ACC296 https://global.fujitsu/-/media/Project/Fujitsu/Fujitsu-HQ/te... FugakuNEXT, the supercomputer it will be used in, also some details about the next-gen Monaka-X: https://global.fujitsu/-/media/Project/Fujitsu/Fujitsu-HQ/technology/research/events/sca-hpcasia2026/SCAsia26-fugakunext.pdf?rev=c773a429546140a3a79c91f4c52bf2ea&hash=1CABB2584E8A0DDBFCB9E17A80D9C457 https://global.fujitsu/-/media/Project/Fujitsu/Fujitsu-HQ/te... For a single CPU: 844 GB/s memory bandwidth (12 channels of DDR5 RDIMM, 8800MT/s). 4.3-6 TFLOPS. Basically comparable to a modern (although not top-end) GPU, so good for HPC & AI workloads. (though only 2 CPUs per node, with GPUs 4-8 is more common)
- menaerus 16d agoBenchmarks will be interesting to see but I doubt the cores alone will be able to reach beyond ~500GB/s of BW, and even if they match that figure it will be great.
- boutell 17d agoThanks for clarifying why this makes sense for inference.
- chao- 17d agoFor anyone not familiar with Fujitsu's CPUs, worth noting their overall long history with HPC, and more recently, ARM. FugakuNEXT is "NEXT" because the current Fugaku (#1 on TOP500 for a time, and still in the top 10) also used an ARM CPU from Fujitsu.
- 3abiton 17d agoMan this looks amazing, more competition is always welcome! The issue for Ai inference is always firmware/software support. Up until recently, that rocm hardware became usable, let alone optimized. Nvidia had a big start, now everyone is trying to catch up
- djray 17d agoCould someone knowledgeable please explain why an AI-focused CPU is superior to a GPU-based solution with an ARM CPU driving the high-level operations, please, especially when the RAM isn't on-chip? I know that for GPU's the model weights have to be transferred over the bus initially, but that only has to occur once for inference use cases, so is the Fujitsu system more about training scenarios? Or is the focus more about efficiency, as these are ARM-based cores with AI additions?
- wmf 16d agoHonestly I think this is an HPC CPU that has been AI-washed. Then you might ask why not use GPUs for HPC and I think the simple answer is that Fujitsu just doesn't want to take on the effort of building a GPU.
- NohatCoder 16d agoYeah, this very much gives the vibe that the original plan was to design a CPU, then suddenly AI AI AI happened, and they squeezed some matmul units into the design at the last minute in order to please the higher ups.
- jzer0cool 17d agoAnyone have idea the likely cost range?
- indigo945 17d agoFujitsu MONAKA Server will be made broadly available from November 2026 to data center operators, enterprises, and the academic and HPC sectors in Japan and Europe, as well as to the defense sector, contributing to national security. So, not in America. A sign of the geopolitical times? If so, a very unusual one to come out of Japan.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- Zigurd 17d agoThe US administration created at least 90% of what we now call technology sovereignty concerns. Technology sovereignty is front and center in this announcement. Before the president started making wildly inappropriate remarks about grabbing territory from allies and other previously unthinkable utterances, almost everyone was happy to buy technology from US hardware and software vendors. Complacency about the state of democracy and rule of law in the US was the norm. Why does this matter? Markets outside the US account for about half of many US technology vendors' revenue. Who is going to speak up first?
- alfalfasprout 17d agothere are many things to blame POTUS for. This isn't one of them... most major fabs were already outside the US to begin with and the US chipmaking industry (well, really Intel) was really struggling even years ago.
- Zigurd 17d agoI don't see the connection. No matter where US chips are manufactured, it's not the location of the fab that causes technology sovereignty concerns. Those concerns come from questions about the stability and rationality of our leadership: can my jet fighter get nerfed if I wanted to defend Greenland from an invasion? Are my spies being spied on by US technology? Those questions didn't used to be significant factors.
- kikkia 17d agoI'd argue that the consolidation of the chip industry in Taiwan has had the most impact here. If/When China does move to take over Taiwan the global chip supply will be devastated and countries are well in their right to want to diversify from that. If anything, POTUS statements just also solidified the point that like Taiwan, they should not rely on USA or any other country for that matter. Hence why so many countries are pushing for some level of self sustainment.
- 17d ago
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- tonyhart7 17d agoJapan technology is back ????
- motionlessveloc 17d agoNamed after monaka, a traditional Japanese confection of sweet red bean paste sandwiched between two wafers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaka It's not terribly popular even in Japan, since it's dry, bland, fragile and has to be assembled on the spot or it goes soggy.
- conorcleary 17d agoGood metaphor, then; do what we must, not what others want from us.
- userbinator 16d ago"sandwiched between two wafers" Pun intended?
- motionlessveloc 16d agoAlmost certainly.
- einpoklum 17d ago> The FUJITSU-MONAKA CPU integrates Fujitsu's extensive expertise in processor ... development Does Fujitsu have extensive expertise in processor development? I don't remember any notable Fujitsu processors. Although, as irusensei notes, this seems to be an ARMv9 processor.
- LandenLove 17d agoNew CPU: :D For AI infrastructure: :(
- Ellis_dev 16d agoMonaka? Hope it's as sweet and satisfying as the dessert. Always good to see more domestic CPU efforts.
- Kuyawa 16d agoYes, AI is that important and every big actor should develop their own, avoiding any strongarming to slowdown and comply to "save the world" by certain bully we all know Kudos to Japan
- cgio 16d agoI think the repeat of Fujitsu, Fujitsu- MONAKA is truly annoying. Is there just this press release, or other better sources?
- arcza 16d agoA reminder of the great minds working tirelessly at this mega-corp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
- Shank 16d agoFujitsu is such a large company that it is unlikely that there is any overlap between these two groups.
- Schlagbohrer 16d agoWow... I want an episode of "Well There's Your Problem" to cover this now. Reminiscent of the Therac-25 scandal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- cindyllm 16d ago[dead]