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Posted by my123 2 days ago

Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA(global.fujitsu)
586 points | 227 commentspage 2
lucaslazarus 18 hours ago|
Wow a corporate TLD in a wild, never seen this outside of the erstwhile domains.google
varispeed 17 hours ago||
Funny they have money to buy TLD or even develop such a fancy CPU, but don't have money to compensate people affected by Post Office scandal.
r_lee 18 hours ago||
there's quite a few

like:

- home.kpmg - global.honda

and probably more I forgot about

but as you can see, they're pretty terrible for replacing .com domains

djray 16 hours ago||
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?

wmf 4 hours ago|
Honestly I think this is an HPC CPU that has been AI-washed. Then you might ask why not use GPUs for HPC and I think the simple answer is that Fujitsu just doesn't want to take on the effort of building a GPU.
hermitShell 18 hours ago||
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.

broken-kebab 18 hours ago||
>the architecture is not designed in Japan

The text says "next-generation CPU, FUJITSU-MONAKA, designed and developed in Japan".

hermitShell 17 hours ago||
It's ARM.
broken-kebab 16 hours ago||
[dead]
Daishiman 18 hours ago|||
> I fail to see how they will take a significant market share or even break even on this venture.

Doesn't matter. You have to start somewhere and this is a good start.

pertymcpert 18 hours ago|||
It's a custom Fujitsu micro-architecture.
0x457 12 hours ago||
It's ARM with extensions.
numpad0 11 hours ago||
Previous generation of this was a monstrosity based on a custom SPARC with ARM front end grafted on top, supporting the version of SPARC extensions they created backported to ARM as a new extension.

So there's a good chance that it's still an optimized half-SPARC inside.

formerly_proven 18 hours ago||
Japan historically behaves as if they have nukes and need a totally sovereign HPC capability to support their stockpile.
vondur 18 hours ago||
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.
numpad0 11 hours ago||
Even x86! Bandai WonderSwan ran on an NEC-made 80186 compatible CPU.
mghackerlady 10 hours ago|||
They made 6502 and Z80 clones as well, nintendo used them iirc
nullbio 17 hours ago||
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.
vouwfietsman 16 hours ago||
> The record for highest number of bureaucrats per capita in the world is owned by Australia

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.

GlacierFox 15 hours ago||
> 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.

yencabulator 17 hours ago||
Here's the previous generation, two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42415754

And here's more technical information about this generation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49443040

numpad0 1 hour ago|

  >  CapeTheory on Dec 14, 2024 
  > Fujitsu seems to be weirdly stubborn about global commercialisation of their CPUs. I know of at least a couple of HPC customers who wanted to build systems based on A64FX and the answer was basically "...nah we're good".
This attitude is seen in a lot of Japanese tech companies and their products over the past multiple decades, and it really irritates me. This, or the root cause of this, has to be one of major reasons why Japanese economy had stagnated, if not the key reason. There had been just so many things created, launched, and ... vanished in the wind.
Ellis_dev 7 hours ago||
Monaka? Hope it's as sweet and satisfying as the dessert. Always good to see more domestic CPU efforts.
Kuyawa 7 hours ago||
Yes, AI is that important and every big actor should develop their own, avoiding any strongarming to slowdown and comply to "save the world" by certain bully we all know

Kudos to Japan

indigo945 16 hours ago||

    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.
drob518 19 hours ago||
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.
michaelbuckbee 19 hours ago||
I feel like even TPS is becoming less of a good metric as we're seeing certain models handle similar problems while burning far fewer tokens.
swiftcoder 19 hours ago|||
> I don’t really care about the CPU GHz and the memory bandwidth ... What I really want to know is how many tokens per second this will deliver

There is a fairly direct link between the two numbers. You can predict the latter from former reasonably well

julius 19 hours ago|||
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?
hermitShell 19 hours ago||
You have to load the model weights into VRAM over PCI-E (from RAM). So the (PCI-E) bandwidth strongly affects time to first token.

You have to run inference on the GPU by reading and writing to VRAM. So TFLOPS of the compute matters, and bandwidth to the VRAM (Always integrated with the GPU, rarely a bottleneck), and this strongly affects tokens/s

If you're doing training workloads or offloading to system RAM, it gets more complicated. (And mostly bound up trying to feed compute on time)

(Edits for clarity.)

usrnm 18 hours ago||
> So the (PCI-E) bandwidth strongly affects time to first token

On dedicated inference hardware I'd expect model weights to never leave the RAM, and you'd probably load them on startup before even starting to serve requests

chorylee 17 hours ago||
[flagged]
redlewel 19 hours ago|
Would be cool to get ahold of one of these in the US.

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.

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