Arm AGI CPU
117 points
2 hours ago
| 16 comments
| newsroom.arm.com
| HN
aurareturn
27 minutes ago
[-]
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

reply
steve1977
31 minutes ago
[-]
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

reply
rafram
20 minutes ago
[-]
AGI (Agentic AI Infrastructure) is joining CSS (Compute Subsystems) in their lineup, apparently. Who’s naming this stuff?
reply
LikesPwsh
2 minutes ago
[-]
The same people who abbreviate "generative" AI in a way that misleadingly conflates it with "general" AI.

Fraud is just the default lifestyle of marketers.

reply
LollipopYakuza
9 minutes ago
[-]
So Artificial General Intelligence and Cascading Style Sheets are not joining forces?
reply
throwa356262
1 hour ago
[-]
AGI = Agentic AI Infrastructure

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

reply
conductr
16 minutes ago
[-]
Missed opportunity to call it AAII and market it as twice as powerful as regular AI.
reply
bee_rider
6 minutes ago
[-]
It’s like they decided to moon all the onlookers while jumping the shark…

I don’t know if it was intentional or they were so far out over their skis that they got their bathing suit caught, but it’s impressive either way.

reply
ux266478
49 minutes ago
[-]
I think this is a poetic encapsulation of the AI industry at this point. A beautifully poignant vignette.
reply
Aerroon
6 minutes ago
[-]
reply
monegator
7 minutes ago
[-]
what lenghts are they going to, just to say we have achieved AGI... now who's moving the goalpost?
reply
RealityVoid
1 hour ago
[-]
It's... really something. Not good. Something.
reply
esafak
18 minutes ago
[-]
The coast is clear to come up with your own expansion for AI!
reply
artyom
16 minutes ago
[-]
Not bait at all
reply
charcircuit
45 minutes ago
[-]
AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence.
reply
lock1
9 minutes ago
[-]
[delayed]
reply
hagbard_c
37 minutes ago
[-]
Are you sure it doesn't stand for Advanced Guessing Instrument? That's what the result often seem to indicate after all.
reply
hootz
58 minutes ago
[-]
What a terrible, terrible name.
reply
lupajz
1 hour ago
[-]
I mean, they could at least use AI to figure out how to name their AI product.
reply
embedding-shape
4 minutes ago
[-]
> I work at ARM, we're launching a new CPU optimized for LLM usage. We're thinking of calling it "Arm Agentic AI Infrastructure CPU", or "Arm AGI CPU" for short. Do you think this is a good idea?

> No. I would not use it as the product name. “AGI CPU” will be read as artificial general intelligence, not “agentic AI infrastructure,” so it invites confusion and sounds hypey.

To bad these executives seemingly don't have access to ChatGPT.

reply
_ache_
17 minutes ago
[-]
They did ask AI if AGI what a great name. It said that it was the greatest name possible. It's bold, aspirational, and ... polarizing?!

Oh god! Mistral tell me it's highly polarizing, will make the buzz and it's risky but anyway people will know that ARM is doing CPU again now (maybe I did put too many context).

reply
foolproofplan
22 minutes ago
[-]
maybe they did and why they got this slop?
reply
SilverElfin
39 minutes ago
[-]
They pathetically don’t mention what it stands for anywhere in this press release. Deceptive marketing at worst, shameless AI-washing at best.
reply
WhrRTheBaboons
35 minutes ago
[-]
I would've went for Agentic Neural Infrastructure personally

ARMANI for short /s

reply
josemanuel
2 minutes ago
[-]
Interesting that Jensen Huang joined in the congratulations for this new product!
reply
mkl
50 minutes ago
[-]
This is like naming your kid World President Smith.
reply
rboyd
37 minutes ago
[-]
This could work. Right? https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-12744-001

My realtor's last name is House

reply
conductr
10 minutes ago
[-]
> Studies 1-5 showed that people are disproportionately likely to live in places whose names resemble their own first or last names (e.g., people named Louis are disproportionately likely to live in St. Louis).

When I lived in Austin, it seemed like a third of boys born were being named Austin. I presume many of them will end up living there as adults but not because of this particular bias, because they were raised there and have family’s there seems to be a more likely driver.

reply
chrisweekly
3 minutes ago
[-]
"Nominative determinism" is everywhere once you look for it. My vet's last name is McStay.
reply
IshKebab
33 minutes ago
[-]
Reporting bias.
reply
midnightdiesel
10 minutes ago
[-]
What a product name choice! I wasn’t expecting ARM to pivot to selling snake oil.
reply
yabutlivnWoods
1 hour ago
[-]
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.

reply
gtowey
54 minutes ago
[-]
The thing they are good at is bullshitting and selling hype. Which we see here doesn't mean they are actually going to be good at running a business. Smart leaders understand they are not omnipotent and omniscient so they surround themselves who know how to get things done. Weak, narcissist leaders think they're the smartest one in the room and fail.

Unfortunately failing upwards is still somehow common, probably because the skill of parting fools from their money is still valuable.

reply
thereitgoes456
47 minutes ago
[-]
No, he is also good at networking. When OpenAI was mission-driven and Sam was more respected, he could convince the most talented people to work for him.

Now the talent is going to other places for a variety of reasons, not all due to Sam (one of which is little room for options to grow). However it’s hard to believe his tanking reputation is not badly hurting the company. Other than Jakub and Greg, I believe there are not many top tier people left, those in top positions are there because they are yes-men to Sam.

reply
mhjkl
51 minutes ago
[-]
What RAM? OpenAI booked the silicon wafers, they can print anything they want on them. I wouldn't call them "far behind" on hardware when OpenAI are actively buying Cerebras chips.
reply
papichulo2023
1 hour ago
[-]
What does "Built for rack-scale agentic efficiency" even means?
reply
throwa356262
44 minutes ago
[-]
If you read past the marketing talk, this is basically a massively multicore system (136) with significantly reduced power usage (300W).

Where does Agentic come into this? ARMs explanation is that future Agentic workloads will be both CPU and GPU bound thus the need for significant CPU efficiency.

reply
inerte
52 minutes ago
[-]
It's volume of tokens consumed x number of agents x rack space. Basically agentic computation density.
reply
ray_v
1 hour ago
[-]
We just say words now that sound good for marketing but have no real meaning.
reply
thewebguyd
47 minutes ago
[-]
Big "but mongodb is web scale" vibes
reply
varispeed
1 hour ago
[-]
It's a code sentence for let's go to the utility room to cross pollinate ideas.
reply
r_lee
59 minutes ago
[-]
I was gonna say just big DCs in marketing yap but really wtf does that mean?
reply
sdwvit
57 minutes ago
[-]
Translation: “Can you give us some money pretty please?”
reply
otabdeveloper4
58 minutes ago
[-]
It's when LLM agents are inefficient that you need a whole rack of servers to get shit done.
reply
RealityVoid
2 hours ago
[-]
Arm apparently now sells their own CPU's.
reply
twostorytower
15 minutes ago
[-]
And the stock is down >2% today
reply
jeffbee
11 minutes ago
[-]
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?
reply
ahoka
4 minutes ago
[-]
All processors have memory on the same die.
reply
rvz
1 hour ago
[-]
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...

reply
nurettin
1 hour ago
[-]
I was wondering who convinced ARM to manufacture hardware. Turns out it was Meta.
reply
walterbell
29 minutes ago
[-]
Nuvia/Qualcomm lawsuit and Softbank.
reply
cmrdporcupine
26 minutes ago
[-]
Now if only they would go back to being "Acorn RISC Machines" and make a nice desktop home computer again...

One can dream.

reply
redwood
54 minutes ago
[-]
Fabless. Like AMD and Nvidia. So I would think about it more as branding and packaging than Manufacturing
reply
anvuong
33 minutes ago
[-]
Huh, many companies use TSMC, in fact, probably all of them use TSMC, including Intel, yet there are only a few who dominates in performance. There are much more in designing chips than what you just listed.
reply
IshKebab
27 minutes ago
[-]
There's a big difference between just providing IP and actually doing the physical design, manufacturing and packaging. You can't just send your RTL to TSMC and magically get packaged chips back.

I haven't ever ordered an ARM SoC but I also wouldn't be surprised if there were significant parts that they left up to integrators before - PLLs, pads, SRAM etc.

reply
SilverElfin
40 minutes 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.

reply
vova_hn2
1 hour ago
[-]
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.

reply
nicoburns
1 hour ago
[-]
> The ARM Neoverse is a group of 64-bit ARM processor cores licensed by Arm Holdings. The cores are intended for datacenter, edge computing, and high-performance computing use. The group consists of ARM Neoverse V-Series, ARM Neoverse N-Series, and ARM Neoverse E-Series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Neoverse

reply
snek_case
46 minutes ago
[-]
I feel like this is most products in the AI space lately. More marketing fuzz than substance. Hard to figure out what thing even does.
reply