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 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
Poor TSMC (and ASML)! They were already struggling with capacity to fulfill orders from their established customers. With ARM now joining the them, I don't know they're going to cope.
Edit: They new CPU will be build with the soon-to-be-former leading edge process of 3nm lithography.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes exactly; he is behind in that he has to buy others chips with little say on how they work.
Apple and Google control their own designs.
Sama is 100% an outsider, merely a customer. The chip insiders are onto his effort to pivot out of meme-stock hyping, into owning a chunk of their fiefdom. They laughed off his claims a couple years ago as insane VC gibberish (third hand paraphrase from social network in chip and hardware land).
No way he can pivot and print whatever. Relative to hardware industry he is one of those programmers who can say just enough to get an interview but whiffs the code challenge.
He has no idea where the bleeding edge is so he will just release dated designs. Chip IP is a moat.
Plus a bunch of RAM companies would be left hanging; no orders, no wafers. Sama risks being Jimmy Hoffa'd imploding the asset values of other billionaires.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
Considering AGI has been degraded into a generic feelgood marketing word, I can't wait to get my AGI-scented deodorant.
In case you haven't noticed, this whole thing has been a grift since 2022. It's kind of amazing that nobody thought of making AGI processors before
the whole AI space is rife with much worse example of what could be considered securities fraud tbh
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
This reminds me of Intel talking about faster web browsing with the new Pentium
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) is joining CSS (Compute Subsystems) in their lineup, apparently. Who’s naming this stuff?
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.
So Artificial General Intelligence and Cascading Style Sheets are not joining forces?
Always have been :)
AGI = Agentic AI Infrastructure
In case you were thinking about some other abbreviation...
Missed opportunity to call it AAII and market it as twice as powerful as regular AI.
A^2I^2 or (AI)^2
I think this is a poetic encapsulation of the AI industry at this point. A beautifully poignant vignette.
It feels more like "blockchain" to me: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-c...
Should have called it A^3I^2 - Arm Agentic Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure.
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.
It's... really something. Not good. Something.
what lenghts are they going to, just to say we have achieved AGI... now who's moving the goalpost?
The coast is clear to come up with your own expansion for AI!
What a terrible, terrible name.
AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence.
Pretty sure it stands for "Artificial abbreviation & hype GeneratIon" nowadays
Are you sure it doesn't stand for Advanced Guessing Instrument? That's what the result often seem to indicate after all.
I mean, they could at least use AI to figure out how to name their AI product.
> 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.
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).
maybe they did and why they got this slop?
Not bait at all
They pathetically don’t mention what it stands for anywhere in this press release. Deceptive marketing at worst, shameless AI-washing at best.
I would've went for Agentic Neural Infrastructure personally
ARMANI for short /s
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.
This is like naming your kid World President Smith.
This could work. Right? https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-12744-001
My realtor's last name is House
My urologist, and I swear I'm not making this up, has the last name "Wiener".
> 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.
"Nominative determinism" is everywhere once you look for it. My vet's last name is McStay.
> Studies 1-5 showed that people are disproportionately likely to live in places whose names resemble their own first or last names
There are several cities in the US that share my last name. I don't live near any of them.
> Study 6 extended this finding to birthday number preferences.
D'oh!
Reporting bias.
Poor TSMC (and ASML)! They were already struggling with capacity to fulfill orders from their established customers. With ARM now joining the them, I don't know they're going to cope.
Edit: They new CPU will be build with the soon-to-be-former leading edge process of 3nm lithography.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes exactly; he is behind in that he has to buy others chips with little say on how they work.
Apple and Google control their own designs.
Sama is 100% an outsider, merely a customer. The chip insiders are onto his effort to pivot out of meme-stock hyping, into owning a chunk of their fiefdom. They laughed off his claims a couple years ago as insane VC gibberish (third hand paraphrase from social network in chip and hardware land).
No way he can pivot and print whatever. Relative to hardware industry he is one of those programmers who can say just enough to get an interview but whiffs the code challenge.
He has no idea where the bleeding edge is so he will just release dated designs. Chip IP is a moat.
Plus a bunch of RAM companies would be left hanging; no orders, no wafers. Sama risks being Jimmy Hoffa'd imploding the asset values of other billionaires.
Arm apparently now sells their own CPU's.
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?
What does "Built for rack-scale agentic efficiency" even means?
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.
It's volume of tokens consumed x number of agents x rack space. Basically agentic computation density.
We just say words now that sound good for marketing but have no real meaning.
Big "but mongodb is web scale" vibes
It's a code sentence for let's go to the utility room to cross pollinate ideas.
I was gonna say just big DCs in marketing yap but really wtf does that mean?
It's when LLM agents are inefficient that you need a whole rack of servers to get shit done.
Translation: “Can you give us some money pretty please?”
What a product name choice! I wasn’t expecting ARM to pivot to selling snake oil.
Interesting that Jensen Huang joined in the congratulations for this new product!
finally, a CPU capable of making API calls to cloud providers
And the stock is down >2% today
ARM riding the "everything is AI" train.
So sad.
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...
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?
All processors have memory on the same die.
How much, what kind, and what is your source?
All mainstream server CPUs have a megabyte or two of SRAM on a core, of course.
I was wondering who convinced ARM to manufacture hardware. Turns out it was Meta.
Now if only they would go back to being "Acorn RISC Machines" and make a nice desktop home computer again...
One can dream.
DGX Spark is pretty nice. It could be cheaper if they removed the NIC though.
Nuvia/Qualcomm lawsuit and Softbank.
Fabless. Like AMD and Nvidia. So I would think about it more as branding and packaging than Manufacturing
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.