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.
> 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 before they could grow. Arista, Juniper, et al ate their lunch using other vendors’ IP. IIRC it was Broadcom and Fulcrum that released the chips that killed them.
>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
These tools are very common in non-nefarious ways for troubleshooting networking, and while vendors set up to serve this space solely as troubleshooting tools, I've also built my own that can sit on a network link and monitor for problems.
In my case it was for mobile wireless signaling traffic (all the coordination for creating a mobile internet connection, handing the connection off between towers, etc), and I'd credit it as one of the reasons you're mobile internet connection is so stable. When LTE first came out, myself and many others solved all sorts of bugs in the equipment and protocols by using or building these sorts of tools.
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.
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.
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.
The XG series switches? Force10 sold them until Dell bought Force10 and continued to sell them (although the firmware changed a lot along the way). They were, AFAIK, pretty popular in the US under the Dell brand.
My home network is XG2000 10G core and a few XG0224 1G/10G dist. Very nice switches.
Ubiquity proved you can bust into the market from the bottom end if you want. Nothing was stopping them from doing the same but like many companies they prefer to focus on how much money they can siphon from the Fortune 1000 so I can't say I feel sorry for them.
AFAIK those sold relatively well, considering the TCO of both sides (NICs were very expensive and there were like a dozen companies vying for position once upon a time). They were also interesting because they were cut-through. CX4 was noticeably lower latency than SFP+. So a very fast, but feature limited architecture which is probably why other players like Cisco and then Arista (aka Broadcom) took over.
We have alliances with Japan and S Korea which predispose us to believing we might be able to get a clean supply chain from them if a new Cold War starts. Out other options don’t even pass a giggle test and that’s the state of the world until some manufacturing is brought back onshore for strategic reasons.
The same way Congress has been subsidizing Boeing and its competitors since WW2 to make sure we can build things that fly if another war ever starts. Or with drones, that we can build ones that will be flown BY US instead of defecting the moment they get in range of the other side.
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.
For a single CPU:
844 GB/s memory bandwidth (12 channels of DDR5 RDIMM, 8800MT/s). 4.3-6 TFLOPS.
Basically comparable to a modern (although not top-end) GPU, so good for HPC & AI workloads. (though only 2 CPUs per node, with GPUs 4-8 is more common)
Benchmarks will be interesting to see but I doubt the cores alone will be able to reach beyond ~500GB/s of BW, and even if they match that figure it will be great.
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.
Man this looks amazing, more competition is always welcome! The issue for Ai inference is always firmware/software support. Up until recently, that rocm hardware became usable, let alone optimized. Nvidia had a big start, now everyone is trying to catch up
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.
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.
>The Phase 2 factory was under construction as of January 2025, next to the Phase 1 facility, and is expected to be completed by 2027.[3] Initially planned for manufacturing semiconductors using a 6 nm process, 3 nm was incorporated into production plans for 2028 in 2026
> Achieving world-class AI inference performance through Japan-developed 2nm 3D-stacked CPU and server integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan
The US administration created at least 90% of what we now call technology sovereignty concerns. Technology sovereignty is front and center in this announcement. Before the president started making wildly inappropriate remarks about grabbing territory from allies and other previously unthinkable utterances, almost everyone was happy to buy technology from US hardware and software vendors. Complacency about the state of democracy and rule of law in the US was the norm.
Why does this matter? Markets outside the US account for about half of many US technology vendors' revenue. Who is going to speak up first?
While others have made good points, your view is also valid. The messaging nowadays is more toward sovereignty even if the core direction hasn't fundamentally changed significantly.
I do find it funny how the harder some folks push for an outcome, the more they bring about the opposite effect.
I mean the US had this sense of confidence that they were at the top of the power structure, it was widely accepted and overall that position and deal seemed to benefit many others even if not to the same scale. For example with Europe, the US got favorable trade terms in exchange for defense.
Then the Trump administration came in and started pushing the narrative of MAGA, to almost be professional victims. Winner of the world lottery and yet still not happy. And so instead of making America Great again, they are on the fast track of being cut out of favorable global trade. They over played their hand. And once others end up being self sufficient again, it is very difficult to get back in the good books.
In trying to avoid being pushed around, they are now starting to see they could be pushed around.
« For example with Europe, the US got favorable trade terms in exchange for defense. » — It is occupation under the guise of defense, always has been. Keeping Germany divided for 35 years (when it could have become neutral and free in the early 50s), eager not to release control but to expand east instead, exploiting disunity, instigating the Yugoslavia wars of the 90s, more recently the Ukraine war (which goes back more than a decade in preparation).
That's what you get when you put a clown in power. I am not american so I don't care but the whole world noticed the bullying and acted accordingly. For example, US learned the hard way they can't bring down Huawei, tariff china or slow their frontier AI. Now Europe with Mistral and Japan with Moneka, both pointing in the same direction. Big middle finger if I've seen one
there are many things to blame POTUS for. This isn't one of them... most major fabs were already outside the US to begin with and the US chipmaking industry (well, really Intel) was really struggling even years ago.
I don't see the connection. No matter where US chips are manufactured, it's not the location of the fab that causes technology sovereignty concerns. Those concerns come from questions about the stability and rationality of our leadership: can my jet fighter get nerfed if I wanted to defend Greenland from an invasion? Are my spies being spied on by US technology?
Those questions didn't used to be significant factors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Likely none? I believe they just don't give graphics out to non-x86 servers. If you mean GPU as in SIMD processor, I believe this is supposed to have it in forms of massive SIMD capabilities on CPU itself.
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.
It think we are now heading towards the final long term ISA setup. x86 and ARM at the top, ARM in the middle and RISC-V for smaller embedded machines that don't need the ARM toolchain.
According to a Feb press release, they're fabbed by TSMC:
> For FUJITSU-MONAKA, the 2nm
semiconductors will tape out next year. Due to this, Rapidus would be unable to meet the
deadline, so TSMC is handling the manufacturing.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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)
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.
The Fujitsu Lifebooks were legendary for their robustness back in the day, I'm genuinely sad you had that experience.
The only fujitsu laptops I used was back in 2011- it was a budget version for on-call and it was fine..
Sounds like the fans running 100% probably contributed significantly to the issue here. If I had to guess it was likely that the C-States were disabled in BIOS somehow so the CPU clock was running at full tilt the whole time, maybe combined with a bad thermal paste job.
I'm not here to defend Fujitsu but I've had really bad experiences with basically every major laptop brand (Dell: majorly bad coil whine and especially faulty soldered RAM, HP: keys vanishing from the keyboard and very weak hinges that break all the time, Apple: The GPU unsoldering itself and the butterfly keyboard shenanigans).
I don't really know any brand with a flawless track record sadly.
Before anyone brings up Thinkpads, they're trading on a reputation that hasn't been true for over a decade. If you have fond memories of a thinkpad it's most likely that you had it from before 2016, or it's "fine", but certainly not great.
I do recall that Fujitsu had a very... unique approach to exposing the Setup option in their firmware. It was just a UEFI boot entry. If that entry was removed, you couldn't get back into the firmware setup; you had to find the name of the setup EFI file and then run that from the EFI console.
Someone high up at Fujitsu is obsessed with making excessively miniaturized laptops. I once had an online fight on whether it's safe to run laptops closed, and realized that only Fujitsu manuals explicitly states that the machine uses keyboard top surfaces as a heatsink and running closed for extended periods is neither safe nor covered by warranty. IIRC Panasonic ones did say similar, but mostly towards noting that it ain't a server. Theirs were also one of the few that didn't seem to have been tested for Jack Bauer subset of MIL-STD-810 criteria, like thrown into a black SUV and flown somewhere in Middle East on a C-5 then C-130 then UH-60 and all the way back to the local soccer field.
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
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.
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'm kind of a Fujitsu fanboy. Since i came across the fact that a pretty modern xeon ecc ram nvme Workstation boards can be optimized to only draw ~10 Watt idle is just impressive, that is less than a gaming router. Even older ones like D3417-B12 were crazy effizient.
I also liked their Primergy Servers, but never got one for a reasonable price to test it out.
Another thing was the Futro series (e.g. S930) that could be used as opnsense firewall or low budget proxmox host.
Unfortunately it was always hard to obtain the high quality stuff as a consumer and years ago they sold their mainboard section to kontron. So no new Fujitsu Mainboards for now... What a pity.
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.
Unless they are used for multi-processing in classical UNIX fashion, or proper microkernels, most applications will hardly take advantage of them.
Managed languages runtimes are probably the ones that would be better equipped to take advantage of them, for distributed JIT, GC and asynchronous code.
The Connection Machine style with StarLisp.
Very few devs can write optimal multi-threaded code that explores the single digit count of cores on their laptops or phones already.
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.
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.
You're right, but the scandal is so upsetting that I personally cannot ever look at Fujitsu the same way even. Also, I think you're neglecting that a large part of why it became so bad was that Fujitsu claimed there was no issue with their software. Even if it were built by a company they acquired, the response to the developing situation was something that the parent company should have stepped in to oversee.
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.
Probably not, Japanese firms excel at hardware and generally build extremely poor software. This a hardware product, so consequently it is probably fairly good.
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.
> 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 before they could grow. Arista, Juniper, et al ate their lunch using other vendors’ IP. IIRC it was Broadcom and Fulcrum that released the chips that killed them.
Another broadcom related tragedy
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>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
These tools are very common in non-nefarious ways for troubleshooting networking, and while vendors set up to serve this space solely as troubleshooting tools, I've also built my own that can sit on a network link and monitor for problems.
In my case it was for mobile wireless signaling traffic (all the coordination for creating a mobile internet connection, handing the connection off between towers, etc), and I'd credit it as one of the reasons you're mobile internet connection is so stable. When LTE first came out, myself and many others solved all sorts of bugs in the equipment and protocols by using or building these sorts of tools.
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.
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.
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Nah, packet mirroring is a standard networking feature and ideally every feature is line rate.
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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.
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The XG series switches? Force10 sold them until Dell bought Force10 and continued to sell them (although the firmware changed a lot along the way). They were, AFAIK, pretty popular in the US under the Dell brand.
My home network is XG2000 10G core and a few XG0224 1G/10G dist. Very nice switches.
Ubiquity proved you can bust into the market from the bottom end if you want. Nothing was stopping them from doing the same but like many companies they prefer to focus on how much money they can siphon from the Fortune 1000 so I can't say I feel sorry for them.
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AFAIK those sold relatively well, considering the TCO of both sides (NICs were very expensive and there were like a dozen companies vying for position once upon a time). They were also interesting because they were cut-through. CX4 was noticeably lower latency than SFP+. So a very fast, but feature limited architecture which is probably why other players like Cisco and then Arista (aka Broadcom) took over.
The likely just didn't want another round of tantrums and troubles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_U.S.%E2%80%93Japan_Semico...
Their servers were gorgeous (on the inside) as well. Clean designs, no clutter.
Having a us based vendor. Fujitsu is huge in Asia for ISPs and so is Mitsubishi and Sumitomo (yes they made or used to make network equipment too)
We have alliances with Japan and S Korea which predispose us to believing we might be able to get a clean supply chain from them if a new Cold War starts. Out other options don’t even pass a giggle test and that’s the state of the world until some manufacturing is brought back onshore for strategic reasons.
The same way Congress has been subsidizing Boeing and its competitors since WW2 to make sure we can build things that fly if another war ever starts. Or with drones, that we can build ones that will be flown BY US instead of defecting the moment they get in range of the other side.
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Seems like a story mirrored across Japanese companies.
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Do you mind elaborating?
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.
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The other sort of network, ironically.
More detailed presentations about the Monaka CPU:
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 GB/s memory bandwidth (12 channels of DDR5 RDIMM, 8800MT/s). 4.3-6 TFLOPS.
Basically comparable to a modern (although not top-end) GPU, so good for HPC & AI workloads. (though only 2 CPUs per node, with GPUs 4-8 is more common)
Benchmarks will be interesting to see but I doubt the cores alone will be able to reach beyond ~500GB/s of BW, and even if they match that figure it will be great.
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.
Man this looks amazing, more competition is always welcome! The issue for Ai inference is always firmware/software support. Up until recently, that rocm hardware became usable, let alone optimized. Nvidia had a big start, now everyone is trying to catch up
Thanks for clarifying why this makes sense for inference.
If anyone is curious and want to skip all the PR talk:
>Combined with SVE2 vector operations and software optimization,
It’s ARMv9.
It was funny looking over this just waiting to see what ISA it was. No surprise that it was ARM but you never know.
Nowadays if you have the source code the ISA is practically irrelevant.
I hoped it would be SPARC.
I hoped it would be Alpha.
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I was hoping risc-v. One of these days
I wonder how many cores they plan to cram in there, at least like 256 right?
144 per the article
Why did they bury the lede so much on what the ISA is?
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.
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...
Funny first thing I did was to search 'arm' and I got 1 result at the bottom of the page.
Hipe they'll be affordable
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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.
I think they'd say if the CPU was fabbed in Japan, instead there's some very "careful" wording:
>next-generation CPU, FUJITSU-MONAKA [1], designed and developed in Japan
>Fujitsu MONAKA Server, powered by the FUJITSU-MONAKA CPU, enhances sovereign capabilities through domestic manufacturing,
>FUJITSU-MONAKA utilizes a 3D-stacked architecture with a state-of-the-art 2nm process for the core and a 5nm process for the cache and I/O sections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Advanced_Semiconductor_M...
>The Phase 2 factory was under construction as of January 2025, next to the Phase 1 facility, and is expected to be completed by 2027.[3] Initially planned for manufacturing semiconductors using a 6 nm process, 3 nm was incorporated into production plans for 2028 in 2026
Right below the headline it says:
> Achieving world-class AI inference performance through Japan-developed 2nm 3D-stacked CPU and server integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan
Sounds pretty clear to me
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Yeah I had a slight hope that they'd be a one of the first real Rapidus customers. but apparently not (for this one at least).
It's 2nm, so it has to be manufactured by TSMC.
I would assume they want to switch to rapidus asap once it comes online
The US administration created at least 90% of what we now call technology sovereignty concerns. Technology sovereignty is front and center in this announcement. Before the president started making wildly inappropriate remarks about grabbing territory from allies and other previously unthinkable utterances, almost everyone was happy to buy technology from US hardware and software vendors. Complacency about the state of democracy and rule of law in the US was the norm.
Why does this matter? Markets outside the US account for about half of many US technology vendors' revenue. Who is going to speak up first?
What? Fujitsu has been making supercomputers in Japan for decades.
Its ARM predecessor started in 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)
And before that they were the using SPARC64: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC64_V
While others have made good points, your view is also valid. The messaging nowadays is more toward sovereignty even if the core direction hasn't fundamentally changed significantly.
I do find it funny how the harder some folks push for an outcome, the more they bring about the opposite effect.
I mean the US had this sense of confidence that they were at the top of the power structure, it was widely accepted and overall that position and deal seemed to benefit many others even if not to the same scale. For example with Europe, the US got favorable trade terms in exchange for defense.
Then the Trump administration came in and started pushing the narrative of MAGA, to almost be professional victims. Winner of the world lottery and yet still not happy. And so instead of making America Great again, they are on the fast track of being cut out of favorable global trade. They over played their hand. And once others end up being self sufficient again, it is very difficult to get back in the good books.
In trying to avoid being pushed around, they are now starting to see they could be pushed around.
« For example with Europe, the US got favorable trade terms in exchange for defense. » — It is occupation under the guise of defense, always has been. Keeping Germany divided for 35 years (when it could have become neutral and free in the early 50s), eager not to release control but to expand east instead, exploiting disunity, instigating the Yugoslavia wars of the 90s, more recently the Ukraine war (which goes back more than a decade in preparation).
That's what you get when you put a clown in power. I am not american so I don't care but the whole world noticed the bullying and acted accordingly. For example, US learned the hard way they can't bring down Huawei, tariff china or slow their frontier AI. Now Europe with Mistral and Japan with Moneka, both pointing in the same direction. Big middle finger if I've seen one
there are many things to blame POTUS for. This isn't one of them... most major fabs were already outside the US to begin with and the US chipmaking industry (well, really Intel) was really struggling even years ago.
I don't see the connection. No matter where US chips are manufactured, it's not the location of the fab that causes technology sovereignty concerns. Those concerns come from questions about the stability and rationality of our leadership: can my jet fighter get nerfed if I wanted to defend Greenland from an invasion? Are my spies being spied on by US technology?
Those questions didn't used to be significant factors.
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It's Arm based, although they barely mention that.
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.
Reading of JASM (TSMC/Sony subsidiary) it seems they're planning on producing at least 3nm chips there in their expansion plans.
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.
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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.
It is in the article - they cite "SVE2" support
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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.
If they didn't mention SVE2, I wouldn't have known either... that would make it arm9 at the earliest...
Quick Google result is it’s basically a Neoverse V2 system, so yeah, armv9.
Edit: it’s funny because this article from 2021 mentioned Fujisu precisely https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/30/arm-unveils-armv9-archit...
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But Arm is owned by SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate.
(I think Japanese sovereignty is the main point of the article.)
Interesting to note that Fujitsu did this when the SPARC architecture was popular: they enhanced/developed a CPU for the same ABI.
Seems they have decided they don’t want to create their own architecture, but take the popular architecture and build on it.
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.
See: - Blue LEDs - Quartz Watches - Lithium-ion Batteries - Bidets
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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.
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Thanks. Looked for that in the article and couldn't find it.
What are the GPU capabilities?
Likely none? I believe they just don't give graphics out to non-x86 servers. If you mean GPU as in SIMD processor, I believe this is supposed to have it in forms of massive SIMD capabilities on CPU itself.
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Thanks I was, of course, looking and very curious what their tool chain story will be.
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.
It think we are now heading towards the final long term ISA setup. x86 and ARM at the top, ARM in the middle and RISC-V for smaller embedded machines that don't need the ARM toolchain.
Fujitsu dropped SPARC for HPC ~seven years ago with their A64fx. That's where ARM SVE comes from in the first place.
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Yes but it's their own design, not licensing Arm cores.
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Named after monaka, a traditional Japanese confection of sweet red bean paste sandwiched between two wafers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaka
It's not terribly popular even in Japan, since it's dry, bland, fragile and has to be assembled on the spot or it goes soggy.
Good metaphor, then; do what we must, not what others want from us.
"sandwiched between two wafers"
Pun intended?
Almost certainly.
Where are the CPUs fabbed? They make a big deal about "sovereign" but is the CPU actually made in Japan, or do they rely on TSMC?
Also odd how big an emphasis they put on AI inference when they don't build the GPU?
According to a Feb press release, they're fabbed by TSMC:
> For FUJITSU-MONAKA, the 2nm semiconductors will tape out next year. Due to this, Rapidus would be unable to meet the deadline, so TSMC is handling the manufacturing.
Source: https://global.fujitsu/en-global/pr/news/2026/02/12-01?utm_s...
According to Rapidus webpage, they are explicitly starting mass production of their 2nm in 2027.
Source: https://www.rapidus.inc/en/iim/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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.
> put on AI inference when they don't build the GPU?
GPU in AI world is essentially a set of specific matrix calculations that this CPU supports on hardware-level. Thought memory speed seems low.
The article says that it’s manufactured in Japan.
where exactly does it say that? I don't consider "designed and developed in Japan" to be the same as manufactured there
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Yeah but TSMC have fab on japan soil
so its as sovereign as you can get
Not for 2nm
I think the repeat of Fujitsu, Fujitsu- MONAKA is truly annoying. Is there just this press release, or other better sources?
Wow a corporate TLD in a wild, never seen this outside of the erstwhile domains.google
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.
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
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?
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.
Monaka? Hope it's as sweet and satisfying as the dessert. Always good to see more domestic CPU efforts.
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.
>the architecture is not designed in Japan
The text says "next-generation CPU, FUJITSU-MONAKA, designed and developed in Japan".
It's ARM.
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> 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.
It's a custom Fujitsu micro-architecture.
It's ARM with extensions.
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Japan historically behaves as if they have nukes and need a totally sovereign HPC capability to support their stockpile.
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.
Even x86! Bandai WonderSwan ran on an NEC-made 80186 compatible CPU.
They made 6502 and Z80 clones as well, nintendo used them iirc
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.
> 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.
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Here's the previous generation, two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49443040
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
So, not in America. A sign of the geopolitical times? If so, a very unusual one to come out of Japan.
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 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.
> 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
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?
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.)
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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.
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.
The Fujitsu Lifebooks were legendary for their robustness back in the day, I'm genuinely sad you had that experience.
The only fujitsu laptops I used was back in 2011- it was a budget version for on-call and it was fine..
Sounds like the fans running 100% probably contributed significantly to the issue here. If I had to guess it was likely that the C-States were disabled in BIOS somehow so the CPU clock was running at full tilt the whole time, maybe combined with a bad thermal paste job.
I'm not here to defend Fujitsu but I've had really bad experiences with basically every major laptop brand (Dell: majorly bad coil whine and especially faulty soldered RAM, HP: keys vanishing from the keyboard and very weak hinges that break all the time, Apple: The GPU unsoldering itself and the butterfly keyboard shenanigans).
I don't really know any brand with a flawless track record sadly.
Before anyone brings up Thinkpads, they're trading on a reputation that hasn't been true for over a decade. If you have fond memories of a thinkpad it's most likely that you had it from before 2016, or it's "fine", but certainly not great.
I do recall that Fujitsu had a very... unique approach to exposing the Setup option in their firmware. It was just a UEFI boot entry. If that entry was removed, you couldn't get back into the firmware setup; you had to find the name of the setup EFI file and then run that from the EFI console.
Their consumer electronics arm is completely unrelated and also majority owned by Lenovo
I was about to say if they hadn't said it was a Fujitsu laptop I would have guessed it was a ThinkPad. Describes my experience with a P1 exactly.
Someone high up at Fujitsu is obsessed with making excessively miniaturized laptops. I once had an online fight on whether it's safe to run laptops closed, and realized that only Fujitsu manuals explicitly states that the machine uses keyboard top surfaces as a heatsink and running closed for extended periods is neither safe nor covered by warranty. IIRC Panasonic ones did say similar, but mostly towards noting that it ain't a server. Theirs were also one of the few that didn't seem to have been tested for Jack Bauer subset of MIL-STD-810 criteria, like thrown into a black SUV and flown somewhere in Middle East on a C-5 then C-130 then UH-60 and all the way back to the local soccer field.
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
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.
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.
2012 and 2017 Celsius H. Very expensive and both maxed up but those fans always running even with limited usage made them the worse to use.
If they can’t build real enterprise sales and software support outside Japan, it’s just another cool Arm chip no one can actually buy
I'm kind of a Fujitsu fanboy. Since i came across the fact that a pretty modern xeon ecc ram nvme Workstation boards can be optimized to only draw ~10 Watt idle is just impressive, that is less than a gaming router. Even older ones like D3417-B12 were crazy effizient.
I also liked their Primergy Servers, but never got one for a reasonable price to test it out.
Another thing was the Futro series (e.g. S930) that could be used as opnsense firewall or low budget proxmox host.
Unfortunately it was always hard to obtain the high quality stuff as a consumer and years ago they sold their mainboard section to kontron. So no new Fujitsu Mainboards for now... What a pity.
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.
Unless they are used for multi-processing in classical UNIX fashion, or proper microkernels, most applications will hardly take advantage of them.
Managed languages runtimes are probably the ones that would be better equipped to take advantage of them, for distributed JIT, GC and asynchronous code.
The Connection Machine style with StarLisp.
Very few devs can write optimal multi-threaded code that explores the single digit count of cores on their laptops or phones already.
IMO we are still far from discovering a truly usable concurrency paradigm (if one even exists).
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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.
Iam very curious as to how well it'll perform outside of Asia.
Performance would probably be the same regardless of where you run the CPU.
And if they'll sell it, seeing as they market it as 'sovereign AI'.
Anyone have idea the likely cost range?
> The FUJITSU-MONAKA CPU integrates Fujitsu's extensive expertise in processor ... development
Does Fujitsu have extensive expertise in processor development? I don't remember any notable Fujitsu processors.
Although, as irusensei notes, this seems to be an ARMv9 processor.
Japan technology is back ????
New CPU:
:D
For AI infrastructure:
:(
Never buy products of this dodgy company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limite...
Not trying to be obnoxious, but it's still Fujitsu.
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It is ultimately Fujitsu responsibility.
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You're right, but the scandal is so upsetting that I personally cannot ever look at Fujitsu the same way even. Also, I think you're neglecting that a large part of why it became so bad was that Fujitsu claimed there was no issue with their software. Even if it were built by a company they acquired, the response to the developing situation was something that the parent company should have stepped in to oversee.
I'm surprised at the downvotes for this, does anyone think I'm misrepresenting the facts? I genuinely don't think I am.
I wouldn't trust that this CPU can do maths properly.
Will it lock up thousands of innocent self-employed post office contractors as part of its instruction set?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
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.
(Which in no way excuses their utter evil.)
Probably not, Japanese firms excel at hardware and generally build extremely poor software. This a hardware product, so consequently it is probably fairly good.
What caused this?
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