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It's Arm based, although they barely mention that.
by rwmj 9d ago
It's Arm based, although they barely mention that.
- thebeardisred 9d agoThanks I was, of course, looking and very curious what their tool chain story will be.
- runmanny 9d ago[dead]
- minimeow 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 8d 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 9d ago[deleted]
- whizzter 9d agoReading of JASM (TSMC/Sony subsidiary) it seems they're planning on producing at least 3nm chips there in their expansion plans.
- nubinetwork 9d agoIf they didn't mention SVE2, I wouldn't have known either... that would make it arm9 at the earliest...
- a012 9d 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 9d agoThat was regarding the HPC Fugaku , this is next generation
- adrian_b 9d agoNo it is not at all Neoverse V2, which is obsolete and has much lower performance.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 9d agoMonaka-X will include SME2 but it didn't make the cut for first-gen Monaka
- titzer 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 9d agoUC Berkeley developed RISC-V, so no doubt their influence within the computer science academia sphere had something to do with it.
- whizzter 8d 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 9d 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 9d agoFujitsu dropped SPARC for HPC ~seven years ago with their A64fx. That's where ARM SVE comes from in the first place.
- mrweasel 8d agoI feel old now.
- FlowingRiver 8d 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 8d agoActual long term ISA setup: RISC-V for everything.
- pertymcpert 9d agoYes but it's their own design, not licensing Arm cores.
- Animats 9d agoThanks. Looked for that in the article and couldn't find it. What are the GPU capabilities?
- numpad0 8d 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 8d 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 8d 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 9d 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 9d agoBut Arm is owned by SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate. (I think Japanese sovereignty is the main point of the article.)