The name of this CPU is bordering on securities fraud. When people see the term "AGI" now, they are assuming "Artificial General Intelligence", not "Agentic AI Infrastructure".

Of course people don't realize that, and people will buy ARM stock thinking they've cracked AGI. The people running Arm absolutely know this, so this name is what we in the industry call a "lie".

This is just a Neoverse CPU that Arm will manufacture themselves at TSMC and then sell directly to customers.

It isn't an "AI" CPU. There is nothing AI about it. There is nothing about it that makes it more AI than Graviton, Epyc, Xeon, etc.

This was already revealed in the Qualcomm vs Arm lawsuit a few years ago. Qualcomm accused Arm of planning to sell their CPUs directly instead of just licensing. Arm's CEO at the time denied it. Qualcomm ends up being right.

I wrote a post here on why Arm is doing this and why now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47032932

I think the interesting bit is actually this:

For the first time in our more than 35-year history, Arm is delivering its own silicon products

AGI = Agentic AI Infrastructure

In case you were thinking about some other abbreviation...

AGI (Agentic AI Infrastructure) is joining CSS (Compute Subsystems) in their lineup, apparently. Who’s naming this stuff?

This is like naming your kid World President Smith.

Today everything is AGI.

Yesterday everything was Agentic.

Everything was AI last week.

Waiting for AGI Agentic AI Crypto toilet paper to be in the supermarket shelves , next to the superseded Object oriented UML Rational Rose tuna.

Arm apparently now sells their own CPU's.

What does "Built for rack-scale agentic efficiency" even means?

This can’t come fast enough, I’ll finally be able to use CSS.

What a product name choice! I wasn’t expecting ARM to pivot to selling snake oil.

How fun would it be if due to improved chips handling more model state RAM needs are reduced and Sama cannot make all those RAM purchases he booked?

VC without a degree who has no grasp of hardware engineering failed up when all he had to do was noodle numbers in an Excel sheet.

He is so far behind the hardware scene he thinks its sitting still and RAM requirements will be a nice linear path to AGI. Not if new chips optimized for model streaming crater RAM needs.

Hilarious how last decades software geniuses are being revealed as incompetent finance engineers whose success was all due to ZIRP offering endless runway.

This looks like an existing pre planned product hastily rebranded AI

For those wanting to know more about software stack,

> Arm is actively collaborating with leading Linux distributions from Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE to ensure certified support for the production systems.

Taken from

https://developer.arm.com/community/arm-community-blogs/b/se...

What is “agentic AI cloud era” referring to? I honestly don’t know what this buzz-speak is targeting. Running models locally on the server, for cloud workloads? Agentic, that is just a LLM pattern.

6GB/s/core

That's...not much right? Maybe it's a lot times N-cores? But I really hope each individual core isn't limited to that.

Edit: 17 minutes to sum RAM?

I miss the all-capitals ARM spelling.

Seeing "Arm AGI" spelled out on a page with an "arm" logo looks slightly cheesy.

But maybe it's actually a good fit for the societal revolution driven by AGI, comparable to the one driven by the DOT.com RevoLut.Ion. (dot com).

Anyways, it sounds like an A.R.M. branded version of the AppleSilicon revolution?

But maybe that's just my shallow categorization.

Oh wow already in use by Meta, OpenAI, and more ?? https://www.arm.com/products/cloud-datacenter/arm-agi-cpu/ec...

The TDP to memory bandwidth& capacity ratio form these blades is in a class of its own, yes?

RISC-V will start making more waves now

It only took a quarter century, but I'm glad that somebody is finally adding a little multicore competition since Moore's law began failing in the mid-2000s.

I looked around a bit, and the going rate appears to be about $10,000 per 64 cores, or around $150 per core. Here is an Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ 64 Core Processor with 61 billion transistors:

https://www.itcreations.com/product/144410

So that's about 500 million transistors per dollar, or 1 billion transistors for $2.

It looks like Arm's 136 core Neoverse V3 has between 150 and 200 billion transistors, so it should cost around $400. Each blade has 2 of those chips, so should be around $800-1000 for compute. It doesn't say how much memory the blades come with, but that's a secondary concern.

Note that this is way too many cores for 1 bus, since by Amdahl's law, more than about 4-8 cores per bus typically results in the remaining cores getting wasted. Real-world performance will be bandwidth-limited, so I would expect a blade to perform about the same as a 16-64 core computer. But that depends on mesh topology, so maybe I'm wrong (AI thinks I might be):

  Intel Xeon Scalable: Switched from a Ring to a Mesh Architecture starting with Skylake-SP to handle higher core counts.
  
  Arm Neoverse V3 / AGI: Uses the Arm CMN-700 (Coherent Mesh Network), which is a high-bandwidth 2D mesh designed specifically to link over 100 cores and multiple memory controllers.

I find all of this to be somewhat exhausting. We're long overdue for modular transputers. I'm envisioning small boards with 4-16 cores between 1-4 GHz and 1-16 GB of memory approaching $100 or less with economies of scale. They would be stackable horizontally and vertically, to easily create clusters with as many cores as one desires. The cluster could appear to the user as an array of separate computers, a single multicore computer running in a unified address space, or various custom configurations. Then libraries could provide APIs to run existing 3D, AI, tensor and similar SIMD code, since it's trivial to run SIMD on MIMD but very challenging to run MIMD on SIMD. This is similar to how we often see Lisp runtimes written in C/C++, but never C/C++ runtimes written in Lisp.

It would have been unthinkable to design such a thing even a year ago, but with the arrival of AI, that seems straightforward, even pedestrian. If this design ever manifests, I do wonder how hard it would be to get into a fab. It's a chicken and egg problem, because people can't imagine a world that isn't compute-bound, just like they couldn't imagine a world after the arrival of AI.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506641 has Arm AGI specs. Looks like it has DDR5-8800 (12x DDR5 channels) so that's just under 12 cores per bus, which actually aligns well with Amdahl's law. Maybe Arm is building the transputer I always wanted. I just wish prices were an order of magnitude lower so that we could actually play around with this stuff.

Poor TSMC (and ASML)! They were already struggling with capacity to fulfill orders from their established customers. With ARM now joining the party, I don't know how they're going to cope.

Edit: The new CPU will be built with the soon-to-be-former leading edge process of 3nm lithography.

And the stock is down >2% today

Hmm all my experience with using AI has been mostly VRAM. I haven't experienced any bottleneck on the CPU side. What does this chip offer over Intel or Apple Silicon? Anyone expert here know whatit is?

The non marketing fluff version of the press release can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506641

Interesting that Jensen Huang joined in the congratulations for this new product!

Call this an “AGI CPU” just feels like the most out of touch, terrible marketing possible. Maybe this is unfair but it makes me think ARM as a whole is incompetent just because it is so tasteless.

> Arm has additionally partnered with Supermicro on a liquid-cooled 200kW design capable of housing 336 Arm AGI CPUs for over 45,000 cores.

Also just bad timing on trying to brag about a partnership with Supermicro, after a founder was just indicted on charges of smuggling Nvidia GPUs. Just bizarre to mention them at all.

Meta are heavily invested in building their own chips with ARM to reduce their reliance on Nvidia as everyone is going after their (Nvidia) data center revenues.

This is why Meta acquired a chip startup for this reason [0] months ago.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-buy-chip-startup-rivos...

AGI will just become the new "Smart Phone" or "Smart Car" losing all meaning.

Yeah dumb name, but we will still use these we have been using Ampere in our office.

is this a cpu that's meant for AI training or is it more for serving inference? I don't quite get why I would want to buy an arm CPU over a nvidia GPU for ai applications.

finally, a CPU capable of making API calls to cloud providers

Agl? @gi? Heck if we can’t compete we’ll confuse!

"AGI" continues to lose all meaning.

ARM must be feeling the heat from all those RISC-V AI startups.

ARM riding the "everything is AI" train.

So sad.

If rich people are this stupid then they deserve to be parted with their cash

Seems like hubris to use this name.

"The I is for IPO" :D

Why not ASI? They aim too low.

arm what we want is an arm chip that can rival m-series not this

I was wondering who convinced ARM to manufacture hardware. Turns out it was Meta.

If I try to cut through the hype, it seems the main features of this processor, or rather processor + memory controller + system architecture, is < 100 ns for accessing anything in system memory and 6 GB/sec for each of a large-ish number of cores, so a (much?) higher overall bandwidth than what we would see in a comparable Intel x86_64 machine.

Am I right or am I misunderstanding?

Many of these words are unexplained. "Memory and I/O on the same die". Oh? What does this mean? All of the DRAM in the photo/render is still on sticks. Do they mean the memory controller? Or is there an embedded DRAM component?

I feel like this is one of the things that people will look back on as the peaking of the bubble.

Like, c’mon, this is ridiculous.

Now every product will have the AI buzzword in it's name, just like 25 years ago product names started with letter e, from electronic.

So we will see AI Toilet Paper launching in the next months.

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Well that explains it, the guy in charge is a wad.

I found this article extremely frustrating to read. Maybe I lack some required prior knowledge and I am not the target audience for this.

> built on the Arm Neoverse platform

What the heck is "Arm Neoverse"? No explanation given, link leads to website in Chinese. Using Firefox translating tool doesn't help much:

> Arm Neoverse delivers the best performance from the cloud to the edge

What? This is just a pile of buzzwords, it doesn't mean anything.

The article doesn't seem to contain any information on how much it costs or any performance benchmarks to compare it with other CPUs. It's all just marketing slop, basically.

Thanks for this article. Very important news.