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.
You should look at the benchmarks of the Cortex-X4 cores used in many smartphones from 2 years ago, because it is the same core as Neoverse V3.
AWS Graviton5 uses the same cores, but it has 192 cores per socket.
So Graviton5 has more cores per socket, but I think that it does not support dual socket boards.
This Arm AGI supports dual socket boards, so it provides 272 cores per board, more than Graviton5 MBs.
However, this is puny in comparison with Intel Clearwater Forest, which provides 576 cores per board, and the Intel Darkmont cores are almost exactly equivalent for all characteristics with Arm Neoverse V3.
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.
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.
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.
Can this be read as finally the financial incentives to join the AI silicone race has become too tempting. Finally the incentives to sell chips are definitely stronger than the cost of competing with your own licensees?
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.
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?
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.
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".
Do you think that we should live in a world where investors who buy on a comical misinterpretation of an acronym are protected from their naivety?
Why isn't there a minority shareholder lawsuit on the news because someone bought MSFT not realizing that Copilot isn't actually certified to fly an airliner? A certain type of people would likely just buy MSFT on a massive lever and then if the bet fails to work out sue pretending that they did not understand.
> The name of this CPU is bordering on securities fraud.
No. For it to be securities fraud, Arm would need to make a materially false statement of fact that misleads investors. Naming the CPU in this way doesn't clear the bar because:
a) the name is clearly product brand, similar to how macOS Lion, or Microsoft Windows, or Ford Mustang, or Yves Saint Laurent Black Opium don't mean literally what they say)
b) Arm explicitly defines it as silicon "designed to power the next generation of AI infrastructure", with the technical specs fully disclosed
c) sophisticated investors, the relevant standard for securities fraud, can read a spec sheet
d) Arms' EVP said "We think that the CPU is going to be fundamental to ultimately achieving AGI", framing it as contribution towards AGI, not AGI itself
An unappreciated aspect of Arm is they really were the Robin Saxby show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Saxby Whichever ISA had him selling it was going to win.
While AArch64 represents the technical revolution they needed their business compass has just gone ever since he stepped down. This grimy stuff, and as others noted competing with your own customers, were no goes in the earlier era.
This smells like the beginning of entshitification at ARM. I'm not saying AMD or Intel are a whole lot better, but the move to compete with licencees of ARM tech and to cheekily use AGI in the name is not going to ensure confidence in the short or long term.
I mean we can all meme on investors, but I don't thing many people can submit a buy order whilst assuming they missed the AGI news headline because of a product name.
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.
88 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 91.1 ms ] threadIn case you were thinking about some other abbreviation...
I expected better from the people who brought us the ARM architecture, with A, R and M profiles.
> 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.
AWS Graviton5 uses the same cores, but it has 192 cores per socket.
So Graviton5 has more cores per socket, but I think that it does not support dual socket boards.
This Arm AGI supports dual socket boards, so it provides 272 cores per board, more than Graviton5 MBs.
However, this is puny in comparison with Intel Clearwater Forest, which provides 576 cores per board, and the Intel Darkmont cores are almost exactly equivalent for all characteristics with Arm Neoverse V3.
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 is why Meta acquired a chip startup for this reason [0] months ago.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-buy-chip-startup-rivos...
> 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.
For the first time in our more than 35-year history, Arm is delivering its own silicon products
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
That would have been dumb.
Do you have a source?
I no longer believe this is like the dotcom. Now it feels like the 1983 video game crash.
So sad.
So we will see AI Toilet Paper launching in the next months.
The TDP to memory bandwidth& capacity ratio form these blades is in a class of its own, yes?
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?
Edit: The new CPU will be built with the soon-to-be-former leading edge process of 3nm lithography.
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".
Why isn't there a minority shareholder lawsuit on the news because someone bought MSFT not realizing that Copilot isn't actually certified to fly an airliner? A certain type of people would likely just buy MSFT on a massive lever and then if the bet fails to work out sue pretending that they did not understand.
No. For it to be securities fraud, Arm would need to make a materially false statement of fact that misleads investors. Naming the CPU in this way doesn't clear the bar because:
a) the name is clearly product brand, similar to how macOS Lion, or Microsoft Windows, or Ford Mustang, or Yves Saint Laurent Black Opium don't mean literally what they say)
b) Arm explicitly defines it as silicon "designed to power the next generation of AI infrastructure", with the technical specs fully disclosed
c) sophisticated investors, the relevant standard for securities fraud, can read a spec sheet
d) Arms' EVP said "We think that the CPU is going to be fundamental to ultimately achieving AGI", framing it as contribution towards AGI, not AGI itself
While AArch64 represents the technical revolution they needed their business compass has just gone ever since he stepped down. This grimy stuff, and as others noted competing with your own customers, were no goes in the earlier era.
I don't understand why this label is still a thing in the current discourse, and I hope such moves will finally help people and the industry move on.
every other interpretation is hollowed out / reduced to "marketing speak" by now ;)