Yes 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.
It 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.
No it is not at all Neoverse V2, which is obsolete and has much lower performance.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).
They 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.
Yeah, searched the page for common architectures (x86,arm and Sparc since it was Fujitsu) since it'd seem silly to use a totally novel architecture but didn't find anything until noticing SVE2.
Thanks 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.
I'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.
I had this idea that Fujitsu was one of those Japanese conglomerates that had operations in all kinds of markets, from electronics to heavy earth moving equipment to air conditioners to locomotives. But that doesn't appear to be the case so I'm wondering which company I'm confusing them with.
Sun invented SPARC, Fujitsu just happened to be the last producer since they built mainframes on it. Reading it seems like they plan to stop producing Sparc processors and machines in a near timeframe so that makes this announcement less surprising.
For many years the Fujitsu SPARC implementations were much faster than the Sun SPARC implementations.
During the decade 1995-2005, until the 64-bit AMD Opteron servers with Linux offered an alternative that crushed any kind of SPARC CPU with Solaris by a much higher performance combined with a much lower price, the SPARC Sun or Fujitsu servers dominated the market for servers used to host the CAD/EDA design tools used in electronics engineering, for the design of integrated circuits or electronic equipment. This means that all the EDA software from vendors like Mentor, Cadence, Synopsis etc. was available only for Solaris. That kind of software could not be run on Windows, due to the 32-bit memory limit. During that time, whoever got Fujitsu servers instead of the sluggish Sun servers, was very lucky.
Not 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.
Fujitsu 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.
Fun 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.
Their CPUs are faster at inference than many GPUs. These are server CPUs with 144 cores and wide memory interface.
Fujitsu has added some ISA extensions for AI inference to the standard Arm ISA, e.g. instructions for inference with FP8.
Even their previous CPU generation was for some time the champion in energy efficiency, with better performance per watt than the NVIDIA GPUs, until a newer generation of NVIDIA GPUs has leapfrogged them.
There are good chances that this new Fujitsu CPU might be again for some time the CPU with the best energy efficiency, but it remains to be seen how it compares with the recent GPUs.
The 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.
Reaching further back, the Sylistic line was mostly quite good/durable, and I still use my Stylstic ST-4110 when I need to use an old scanner or control a CNC machine on my back deck when cutting tropical hardwoods.
Really miss the transflective display and wish that there were newer devices with such technology
What year? The ones I had were the best. Very expensive, but service at the office & at home, very sturdy, very long battery life. That was somewhere early 2000s.
I just have Fujitsu Lifebooks at Home since 2007. I think they are good, came with a bloat free Windows. I bought even one for my Mom over 10 years ago. I just changed once the HDD with a SSD. Now all my Lifebook run with Linux just flawless.
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
The '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.
It doesn't seem that way to me. I'm inclined to think that the British consulting company created the problem, seeing as I've seen great things come from Fujitsu, and only just learned of this company. If some execs at Fujitsu were willfully involved, it hardly raises it to my standard of boycotting a megacorp with all the other corporate wrongs I hear about.
I 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.
One 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.
I 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?
I 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.
Every 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.
Every 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.
> 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.
I'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.
Back 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.
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.
> I always wondered what held them back from building a meaningful networking business in the US.
It was just timing. Their networking gear was built on some very impressive ASICs which became commodity chips a few years later. Arista et al ate their lunch using other vendors’ IP.
>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
I'm sure there were good reaasons for this, but man this just sounds bad. Like that's the spec I think NSA must give to their contractors outfitting 611 Folsom Street's Room 641A
There are companies that mirror their traffic to storage for a few days to be able to look back and troubleshoot issues. ALL their traffic, proactively.
For US federal government, "Office of Management and Budget" says to store 72 hours of packet capture, since 2021 (partially in response to SolarWinds attack). (M-21-31)
It does sound bad the way OP described it, but packet or HTTP mirroring is a standard feature of A/B testing and blue-green deployments of a very critical code. Mirror traffic between version 1 and 2, then compare response body, response time and return response A to the end users.
Port mirroring is the network engineer's equivalent of using breakpoints in a debugger for a programmer. It allows you to inspect what happens on the wire to get a clue for what's wrong.
Conglomerates in general, and especially Japanese ones, are heterogeneous enough that those are basically two different companies. The British "Fujitsu" was an acquisition that I'm certain they now deeply, deeply regret.
Press releases are sadly like that. Fujitsu's main page has it in the first line:
> FUJITSU-MONAKA is a Next-Gen Arm-based processor, set for release in 2027, designed to address the challenges of next-generation data centers with its unmatched performance and power efficiency.
For 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.
Could 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?
Fujitsu 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.
110 comments
[ 9.4 ms ] story [ 80.6 ms ] threadIt'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.
See e.g.:
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/hot-chips-2026-fujitsus-monaka-...
They have provided far more details than companies like Apple or Qualcomm.
Edit: it’s funny because this article from 2021 mentioned Fujisu precisely https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/30/arm-unveils-armv9-archit...
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).
Seems they have decided they don’t want to create their own architecture, but take the popular architecture and build on it.
See: - Blue LEDs - Quartz Watches - Lithium-ion Batteries - Bidets
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.
During the decade 1995-2005, until the 64-bit AMD Opteron servers with Linux offered an alternative that crushed any kind of SPARC CPU with Solaris by a much higher performance combined with a much lower price, the SPARC Sun or Fujitsu servers dominated the market for servers used to host the CAD/EDA design tools used in electronics engineering, for the design of integrated circuits or electronic equipment. This means that all the EDA software from vendors like Mentor, Cadence, Synopsis etc. was available only for Solaris. That kind of software could not be run on Windows, due to the 32-bit memory limit. During that time, whoever got Fujitsu servers instead of the sluggish Sun servers, was very lucky.
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.
What are the GPU capabilities?
(I think Japanese sovereignty is the main point of the article.)
Also odd how big an emphasis they put on AI inference when they don't build the GPU?
Fujitsu has added some ISA extensions for AI inference to the standard Arm ISA, e.g. instructions for inference with FP8.
Even their previous CPU generation was for some time the champion in energy efficiency, with better performance per watt than the NVIDIA GPUs, until a newer generation of NVIDIA GPUs has leapfrogged them.
There are good chances that this new Fujitsu CPU might be again for some time the CPU with the best energy efficiency, but it remains to be seen how it compares with the recent GPUs.
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.
Really miss the transflective display and wish that there were newer devices with such technology
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
There is a fairly direct link between the two numbers. You can predict the latter from former reasonably well
like:
- home.kpmg - global.honda
and probably more I forgot about
but as you can see, they're pretty terrible for replacing .com domains
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.
Doesn't matter. You have to start somewhere and this is a good start.
The text says "next-generation CPU, FUJITSU-MONAKA, designed and developed in Japan".
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was just timing. Their networking gear was built on some very impressive ASICs which became commodity chips a few years later. Arista et al ate their lunch using other vendors’ IP.
I'm sure there were good reaasons for this, but man this just sounds bad. Like that's the spec I think NSA must give to their contractors outfitting 611 Folsom Street's Room 641A
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/TLP%20CLEAR...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
(Which in no way excuses their utter evil.)
>Combined with SVE2 vector operations and software optimization,
It’s ARMv9.
> FUJITSU-MONAKA is a Next-Gen Arm-based processor, set for release in 2027, designed to address the challenges of next-generation data centers with its unmatched performance and power efficiency.
https://global.fujitsu/en-global/technology/research/fujitsu...
It is no secret it is Arm; MONAKA was announced in late 2024.
https://www.techpowerup.com/329761/fujitsu-previews-monaka-1...
wccftech summary: https://wccftech.com/fujitsus-monaka-chip-3d-stacks-2nm-cpu-...
2026: https://global.fujitsu/-/media/Project/Fujitsu/Fujitsu-HQ/te...
2023: 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/te...
For a single CPU: 844.8 GB/s memory bandwidth (12 channels of DDR5 RDIMM, 8800MT/s). 4.3-6 TFLOPS.
Basically comparable to a modern GPU, so good for HPC & AI workloads. (though only 2 CPUs per node, with GPUs 4-8 is more common)
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?