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a11r 1 hours ago [-]
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.
throwup238 39 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
alightsoul 26 minutes ago [-]
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)
calmworm 41 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
filoleg 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
HPsquared 34 minutes ago [-]
The other sort of network, ironically.
irusensei 34 minutes ago [-]
If anyone is curious and want to skip all the PR talk:
>Combined with SVE2 vector operations and software optimization,
It’s ARMv9.
Perz1val 4 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how many cores they plan to cram in there, at least like 256 right?
alightsoul 3 hours ago [-]
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.
iicc 3 hours ago [-]
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,
iicc 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
>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
kennywinker 53 minutes ago [-]
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
amelius 50 minutes ago [-]
So, server manufactured/integrated in Japan; actual chip manufactured elsewhere (but "developed" in Japan, whatever that means)?
adrian_b 32 minutes ago [-]
They made a detailed presentation at Hot Chips.
All the component chips are made at TSMC, in various processes.
"Developed in Japan" means the same thing like "developed in USA" means for NVIDIA or AMD or Intel. You can design chips anywhere on the planet, as long as TSMC is willing to provide you the required documentation and EDA libraries (which it does only if you already are or they believe that you will be a big customer).
ddtaylor 42 minutes ago [-]
Doesn't really make sense to me. The whole "sovereign" thing is to basically say you won't be screwed if you go to war with a country tomorrow because you are dependent on their supply chain. Nothing about this changes that IMO. They're still getting the chips fabbed somewhere else and run the same risks.
adrian_b 29 minutes ago [-]
True, but besides wars there are other dangers, e.g. USA does not declare war when they apply "sanctions" randomly, under the legal theory that they can dictate how anything that includes some piece of US origin may be used by its owner.
Since that theory began to be used, anyone outside US has become anxious to become "sovereign", i.e. to stop using anything about which a foreign state can claim to have rights.
AtlasBarfed 10 minutes ago [-]
Isn't the supply chain on advanced semiconductors ludicrously extended?
Wafers rare Earth's, specialized equipment, etc?
aurareturn 12 minutes ago [-]
The compute part must have been made in Taiwan because it uses TSMC N2. TSMC N2 is only available in Taiwan right now due to a law restricting the latest node to Taiwan for 1-2 years.
alightsoul 4 minutes ago [-]
That's Taiwan's silicon shield which the taiwanese see as important. That's why japan has rapidus and the us has Intel
wongarsu 46 minutes ago [-]
depends on whether you read it as
((2nm 3d stacked CPU) and server) (integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan)
or
(2nm 3d stacked CPU) and (server integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan)
TheRealPomax 45 minutes ago [-]
Indeed, it is extremely clear: by not saying "manufactured in Japan", the words "developed in Japan" tell you that they drew up the designs for the CPU in Japan, and then sent those designs off to a fab outside Japan for actual manufacturing. Then they bring those CPUs back to Japan, so that the server can be manufactured in Japan even if the server components are not.
That manufacturing step may change in the future, but right now that CPU is not "Made in Japan", it's only "Designed in Japan".
adrian_b 16 minutes ago [-]
They did a presentation at Hot Chips, with all these details.
The core die is made with TSMC-N2P, while the SRAM die and the peripheral die are made with TSMC-N5.
Their CPU is designed in Japan, like the AMD CPUs or the Intel CPUs are designed in USA (the latest Panther Lake Intel CPUs have returned for fabrication to USA in 2026, but they also cost double than the corresponding Arrow Lake models made at TSMC in 2025, and their GPUs are still made at TSMC).
szatkus 2 hours ago [-]
It's 2nm, so it has to be manufactured by TSMC.
alightsoul 25 minutes ago [-]
I would assume they want to switch to rapidus asap once it comes online
rwmj 3 hours ago [-]
It's Arm based, although they barely mention that.
minimeow 3 hours ago [-]
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.
whizzter 1 hours ago [-]
Reading of JASM (TSMC/Sony subsidiary) it seems they're planning on producing at least 3nm chips there in their expansion plans.
1 hours ago [-]
imtringued 2 hours ago [-]
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 have provided far more details than companies like Apple or Qualcomm.
titzer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
izardak 1 hours ago [-]
It is in the article - they cite "SVE2" support
whizzter 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, searched the page for common architectures (x86,arm and Sparc since it was Fujitsu) since it'd seem silly to use a totally novel architecture but didn't find anything until noticing SVE2.
gpderetta 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
nubinetwork 2 hours ago [-]
If they didn't mention SVE2, I wouldn't have known either... that would make it arm9 at the earliest...
a012 2 hours ago [-]
Quick Google result is it’s basically a Neoverse V2 system, so yeah, armv9.
No it is not at all Neoverse V2, which is obsolete and has much lower performance.
It is a custom Armv9.3-A design (same ISA like the Arm C1 CPUs from the flagship smartphones of 2026), but it has double-width execution units for SVE2 (i.e. 256-bit width, vs. 128-bit for the other Arm CPUs) and it has some ISA extensions for AI/ML, e.g. instructions for inference with FP8 (BF16 is already supported by the standard Arm ISA).
Despite the fact that Armv9.3-A may include SME (scalable matrix extension, like in the Apple CPUs and in the Arm C1 CPUs), Fujitsu did not mention SME, so I assume that they did not implement it and they rely on their enhanced SVE2 (which is not surprising, while the origin of Arm SME is at Apple, the origin of Arm SVE is at Fujitsu).
my123 4 minutes ago [-]
Monaka-X will include SME2 but it didn't make the cut for first-gen Monaka
voxelghost 1 hours ago [-]
That was regarding the HPC Fugaku , this is next generation
amelius 48 minutes ago [-]
But Arm is owned by SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate.
(I think Japanese sovereignty is the main point of the article.)
shrubble 2 hours ago [-]
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.
whizzter 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
adrian_b 54 seconds ago [-]
For many years the Fujitsu SPARC implementations were much faster than the Sun SPARC implementations.
During the decade 1995-2005, until the 64-bit AMD Opteron servers with Linux offered an alternative that crushed any kind of SPARC CPU with Solaris by a much higher performance combined with a much lower price, the SPARC Sun or Fujitsu servers dominated the market for servers used to host the CAD/EDA design tools used in electronics engineering. During that time, whoever got Fujitsu servers instead of the sluggish Sun servers, was very lucky.
qmarchi 2 hours ago [-]
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.
I'm sure there's plenty of other stuff invented in Japan, but that's really beside the point.
The industry is now mature enough that nobody really wants the headache of a new architecture at this point in time, Risc-V got a pass for being a grassroots movement growing out off FPGA's since the IP situation was more or less clear or even predatory with all existing architectures, Power, Sparc,SuperH,68k,etc are buried for good reasons.
Animats 1 hours ago [-]
Thanks. Looked for that in the article and couldn't find it.
What are the GPU capabilities?
mrweasel 2 hours ago [-]
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.
formerly_proven 1 hours ago [-]
Fujitsu dropped SPARC for HPC ~seven years ago with their A64fx. That's where ARM SVE comes from in the first place.
thebeardisred 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks I was, of course, looking and very curious what their tool chain story will be.
pertymcpert 1 hours ago [-]
Yes but it's their own design, not licensing Arm cores.
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?
DashAnimal 3 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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.
Max-q 3 hours ago [-]
The article says that it’s manufactured in Japan.
ranger_danger 3 hours ago [-]
where exactly does it say that? I don't consider "designed and developed in Japan" to be the same as manufactured there
bradyd 3 hours ago [-]
At the very top of the article:
"Achieving world-class AI inference performance through Japan-developed 2nm 3D-stacked CPU and server integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan"
hobofan 2 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure it's worded in a way that it applies only to the server, so it should be read as two distinct things:
- Japan-developed 2nm 3D-stacked CPU
- server integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan
3 hours ago [-]
dopa42365 2 hours ago [-]
Ever seen the phrase "diffused in Taiwan, assembled in Malaysia"?
sgerenser 3 hours ago [-]
"Japan-developed CPU..." plus the server itself (parts, power supplies, case, etc.) integrated, developed and manufactured in Japan. It sounds like they're weasel-wording it a bit, but I don't think the CPU itself is manufactured in Japan, only "developed."
tecleandor 3 hours ago [-]
Yep. I'd say the CPU is manufactured outside, and the rest of the server in Japan.
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.
dijit 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nhubbard 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dwroberts 2 hours ago [-]
Their consumer electronics arm is completely unrelated and also majority owned by Lenovo
criddell 2 hours ago [-]
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.
_trampeltier 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
anonzzzies 1 hours ago [-]
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.
WillAdams 2 hours ago [-]
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
hermitShell 2 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 1 hours ago [-]
>the architecture is not designed in Japan
The text says "next-generation CPU, FUJITSU-MONAKA, designed and developed in Japan".
hermitShell 17 minutes ago [-]
It's ARM.
Daishiman 1 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 1 hours ago [-]
It's a custom Fujitsu micro-architecture.
formerly_proven 1 hours ago [-]
Japan historically behaves as if they have nukes and need a totally sovereign HPC capability to support their stockpile.
vondur 2 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.
nullbio 21 minutes 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.
qsbuilder 22 minutes ago [-]
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
lucaslazarus 2 hours ago [-]
Wow a corporate TLD in a wild, never seen this outside of the erstwhile domains.google
varispeed 14 minutes 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 1 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
drob518 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 1 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 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
zackmorris 2 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
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.
redlewel 3 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.
sandreas 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
sherujgr 3 hours ago [-]
Iam very curious as to how well it'll perform outside of Asia.
mrweasel 2 hours ago [-]
Performance would probably be the same regardless of where you run the CPU.
esafak 3 hours ago [-]
And if they'll sell it, seeing as they market it as 'sovereign AI'.
kittikitti 2 hours ago [-]
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
Maken 2 hours ago [-]
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.
varispeed 2 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't trust that this CPU can do maths properly.
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.)
tristor 1 hours ago [-]
Probably not, Japanese firms excel at hardware and generally build extremely poor software. This a hardware product, so consequently it is probably fairly good.
seki285 58 minutes ago [-]
What caused this?
t43562 29 minutes ago [-]
I think Ruby would be a counterpoint - although it's the only one I know of.
I worked for a Japanese company although in a local office with local management. Through all those layers of protection I got the impression that they suffer from what all corporates suffer from - no software engineers that have made it to the top. Software companies run by people who have no clue.
In the US, for example, I think some people who have a clue or a partial clue have made it up the ladder in some places and therefore although everyone there has their horror stories of idiotic behavior it is probably somewhat better.
tristor 53 minutes ago [-]
Honestly, no idea. In my career I have worked with a lot of Japanese firms and have always found their engineers to be excellent. I used to think it was a lack of consideration for UX, but that obviously can't be true when you see excellent examples of UX in hardware (e.g. Switch controls), even though its exceedingly rare on the software side.
If anyone on HN knows (there are several other commenters more deeply steeped in Japanese engineering culture), I would love to know why as well.
logicchains 39 minutes ago [-]
Japanese culture and work culture is very hierarchical/top down. They excel at waterfall but it's basically impossible to do agile in a Japanese office environment, and waterfall is suitable for hardware but terrible for building software.
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.
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.
>Combined with SVE2 vector operations and software optimization,
It’s ARMv9.
>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,
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
> 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
All the component chips are made at TSMC, in various processes.
"Developed in Japan" means the same thing like "developed in USA" means for NVIDIA or AMD or Intel. You can design chips anywhere on the planet, as long as TSMC is willing to provide you the required documentation and EDA libraries (which it does only if you already are or they believe that you will be a big customer).
Since that theory began to be used, anyone outside US has become anxious to become "sovereign", i.e. to stop using anything about which a foreign state can claim to have rights.
Wafers rare Earth's, specialized equipment, etc?
((2nm 3d stacked CPU) and server) (integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan)
or
(2nm 3d stacked CPU) and (server integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan)
That manufacturing step may change in the future, but right now that CPU is not "Made in Japan", it's only "Designed in Japan".
The core die is made with TSMC-N2P, while the SRAM die and the peripheral die are made with TSMC-N5.
Their CPU is designed in Japan, like the AMD CPUs or the Intel CPUs are designed in USA (the latest Panther Lake Intel CPUs have returned for fabrication to USA in 2026, but they also cost double than the corresponding Arrow Lake models made at TSMC in 2025, and their GPUs are still made at TSMC).
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.
See e.g.:
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/hot-chips-2026-fujitsus-monaka-...
They have provided far more details than companies like Apple or Qualcomm.
Edit: it’s funny because this article from 2021 mentioned Fujisu precisely https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/30/arm-unveils-armv9-archit...
It is a custom Armv9.3-A design (same ISA like the Arm C1 CPUs from the flagship smartphones of 2026), but it has double-width execution units for SVE2 (i.e. 256-bit width, vs. 128-bit for the other Arm CPUs) and it has some ISA extensions for AI/ML, e.g. instructions for inference with FP8 (BF16 is already supported by the standard Arm ISA).
Despite the fact that Armv9.3-A may include SME (scalable matrix extension, like in the Apple CPUs and in the Arm C1 CPUs), Fujitsu did not mention SME, so I assume that they did not implement it and they rely on their enhanced SVE2 (which is not surprising, while the origin of Arm SME is at Apple, the origin of Arm SVE is at Fujitsu).
(I think Japanese sovereignty is the main point of the article.)
Seems they have decided they don’t want to create their own architecture, but take the popular architecture and build on it.
During the decade 1995-2005, until the 64-bit AMD Opteron servers with Linux offered an alternative that crushed any kind of SPARC CPU with Solaris by a much higher performance combined with a much lower price, the SPARC Sun or Fujitsu servers dominated the market for servers used to host the CAD/EDA design tools used in electronics engineering. During that time, whoever got Fujitsu servers instead of the sluggish Sun servers, was very lucky.
See: - Blue LEDs - Quartz Watches - Lithium-ion Batteries - Bidets
The industry is now mature enough that nobody really wants the headache of a new architecture at this point in time, Risc-V got a pass for being a grassroots movement growing out off FPGA's since the IP situation was more or less clear or even predatory with all existing architectures, Power, Sparc,SuperH,68k,etc are buried for good reasons.
What are the GPU capabilities?
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.
And here's more technical information about this generation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49443040
Also odd how big an emphasis they put on AI inference when they don't build the GPU?
> 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
GPU in AI world is essentially a set of specific matrix calculations that this CPU supports on hardware-level. Thought memory speed seems low.
- Japan-developed 2nm 3D-stacked CPU
- server integrated, developed, and manufactured in Japan
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.
Really miss the transflective display and wish that there were newer devices with such technology
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 text says "next-generation CPU, FUJITSU-MONAKA, designed and developed in Japan".
Doesn't matter. You have to start somewhere and this is a good start.
like:
- home.kpmg - global.honda
and probably more I forgot about
but as you can see, they're pretty terrible for replacing .com domains
There is a fairly direct link between the two numbers. You can predict the latter from former reasonably well
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.)
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
(Which in no way excuses their utter evil.)
I worked for a Japanese company although in a local office with local management. Through all those layers of protection I got the impression that they suffer from what all corporates suffer from - no software engineers that have made it to the top. Software companies run by people who have no clue.
In the US, for example, I think some people who have a clue or a partial clue have made it up the ladder in some places and therefore although everyone there has their horror stories of idiotic behavior it is probably somewhat better.
If anyone on HN knows (there are several other commenters more deeply steeped in Japanese engineering culture), I would love to know why as well.