Comment by hermitShell
19 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.
>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.
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.
Japan historically behaves as if they have nukes and need a totally sovereign HPC capability to support their stockpile.