Turns out artificial general intelligence was a CPU this whole time
Arm unveiled its first homegrown silicon — yes, an actual chip, not another shake-n-bake blueprint — during an event in San Francisco on Tuesday, and said that flagship customer Meta is set to deploy the 136-core CPU at scale later this year.
Dubbed the AGI CPU, the British chip designer’s first Arm-branded datacenter processor is designed with agentic AI in mind. You heard it here first folks, artificial general intelligence (AGI) is here and it’s a ... it’s a CPU.
The new hardware represents a sea change in the British chip designer's business model. While Arm is no stranger to datacenter silicon, its involvement in those products up until now has been to license the core IP or instruction set architecture necessary to build them.
Despite the hypemaxxed branding, the chip’s Arm Neoverse V3 cores won’t be running AI models themselves. That’s a job for GPUs or one of the growing number of high-end AI ASICs. Instead, Arm sees its first datacenter CPU powering AI agents. In this respect, the chip will compete directly with Nvidia’s standalone Vera CPUs and rack systems detailed at GTC last week.
“We think that the CPU is going to be fundamental to ultimately achieving AGI,” Mohamed Awad, Arm’s EVP of cloud AI, told El Reg.
While GPUs have gotten the lion’s share of attention in recent years, the rise of agentic systems like OpenClaw have brought the need for general-purpose compute back into view. These frameworks need CPU cores and memory to write and execute code, automate tasks, and facilitate the reinforcement learning used to train next gen models.
Arm is betting on the proliferation of these agents to drive a four-fold increase in CPU demand, and it’s positioning its latest chip to capitalize on this trend.
A CPU built for AI
Arm’s AGI CPU is a 300-watt part with 136 of its Neoverse V3 cores clocked at up to 3.7 GHz (3.2 GHz base), spread across two dies fabbed on TSMC’s 3 nm process. The processor features 2 MB of L2 cache per core along with 128 MB of shared system-level cache (SLC).
According to Awad, a concerted effort has been made to avoid including accelerators or functions which eat up die area and ultimately don’t benefit the target workload.
“The way that legacy CPUs had been built worried about things like support for legacy applications,” he said. “We specifically didn't want to add things that weren't going to...be 100 percent utilized in the mission of this device.”
He added, “This is a clean sheet design meant to address all that.”
Unlike Nvidia’s Vera, Arm has opted to forego simultaneous multithreading for its agent-optimized processors, with Awad arguing that one thread per core allows for more deterministic performance scaling.
The CPU is fed by 12 channels of DDR5 — presumably 6 channels per die — with support for memory speeds up to 8800 MT/s. At 825 GB/s of aggregate bandwidth, that works out to 6 GB/s per core.
Unlike many modern CPUs, the chip’s memory and I/O functions are integrated into the same die as the compute in an effort to minimize latency. Because of this, each socket will be exposed to the operating system as two distinct NUMA domains.
Finally, for I/O, the processor is equipped with 96 lanes of PCIe 6.0 connectivity and support for CXL 3.0.
Maximum density
Meta, which is already deploying large numbers of Nvidia’s Arm-based Grace CPUs and plans to use the company’s Vera chips, will also be among Arm’s first major CPU customers.
As part of these efforts, Arm says that its validated two different OCP rack designs. There's a 36 kW air-cooled rack with 30 compute blades totalling 8160 cores per rack.
The company has also validated an even denser 200 kW liquid-cooled rack with 42 eight-node servers, which works out to 45,696 cores. For reference, that’s more than twice the core count of Nvidia’s Vera ETL256 CPU racks at 22,528.
For more than just agents
Meta isn’t the only customer lining up to gobble Arm’s new processors. OpenAI, SAP, Cerebras, Cloudflare, F5, SK Telecom, and Rebellions are also listed as early customers.
In addition to AI agents, Arm sees applications for the chip as a head node for custom accelerators, or even as a general purpose CPU for networking or storage. In fact, we’re told that OEM partners, including Lenovo, are already working on 19-inch systems using the chip.
Up until now, enterprise customers have had limited choices with regard to Arm datacenter silicon, with Ampere computing being the only non-cloud-based player in town.
Arm’s AGI CPU is set to arrive later this year. Whether it’ll be what actually brings about The Singularity is another matter entirely. ®
Correction: In a briefing before the event, Arm gave us incorrect numbers for the first air-cooled rack: It is in fact 36kW with 30 blades, for a total of 8,160 cores.