What just happened? During the ActivateNow: Technology Summit held at the Computer History Museum in California last week, a Fujitsu representative casually mentioned an ARM-based CPU slated for 2027 that caught the attention of some in the audience. The Register pressed the company for more details and learned that it was developing a successor to the A64FX codenamed Monaka.
Fujitsu launched its first high-performance ARM-based CPU (HPC) in 2019. The aptly named A64FX has 48 processor cores clocked around 2GHz and four additional auxiliary cores. It has 32 GB of HBM2 onboard and many HPC features including 512-bit scalable vector extensions (SVEs). Approximately 160,000 A64FXs power the Fugaku supercomputer, which was the world’s fastest supercomputer from 2020 to 2022 when it was succeeded by the supported Epyc border.
“It will have a wider range of features and prove to be more energy efficient” than the A64FX, said a Monaka spokesperson. log. “The range of potential applications is broader than that of the A64FX, which has special properties (such as interconnects) specific to Fugaku.” Some of these features include a Tofu interconnect D texture and a limit of 32GB of memory, which cannot be expanded.
Energy efficiency is a design priority for the Monaca. Fujitsu emphasizes the “enormous energy efficiency” that will “contribute to a carbon neutral and sustainable society” in its materials. The company hopes the CPU will be at least 70 percent faster than its competitors on AI and HPC workloads with twice the efficiency.
The Japan New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) encourages and supports Fujitsu in its endeavors to create more energy efficient processors as part of its plan to reduce power consumption in Japan’s data centers by 40% by 2030. As part of this initiative, Fujitsu is also contributing In joint development of other energy-efficient technologies, including low-power accelerators and photonics-based network interface controllers (NICs).
Arm-based treatments have proven to be a popular choice in countries that promote sustainability. Arm processors are intrinsically more efficient than x86 alternatives, with AmazonGoogle and Nvidia are both investing in their implementation of HPC workloads at the moment.
