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> 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

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.

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...

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)

Their servers were gorgeous (on the inside) as well. Clean designs, no clutter.

Seems like a story mirrored across Japanese companies.

Fujitsu is such a large company that it is unlikely that there is any overlap between these two groups.

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.

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.

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.

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 wonder how many cores they plan to cram in there, at least like 256 right?

Why did they bury the lede so much on what the ISA is?

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

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,

It's 2nm, so it has to be manufactured by TSMC.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If they didn't mention SVE2, I wouldn't have known either... that would make it arm9 at the earliest...

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. Looked for that in the article and couldn't find it.

What are the GPU capabilities?

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.

Yes but it's their own design, not licensing Arm cores.

Good metaphor, then; do what we must, not what others want from us.

"sandwiched between two wafers"

Pun intended?

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.

Yeah but TSMC have fab on japan soil

so its as sovereign as you can get

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

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.

>the architecture is not designed in Japan

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

> 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.

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

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.

  >  CapeTheory on Dec 14, 2024 
  > Fujitsu seems to be weirdly stubborn about global commercialisation of their CPUs. I know of at least a couple of HPC customers who wanted to build systems based on A64FX and the answer was basically "...nah we're good".

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?

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.

Their consumer electronics arm is completely unrelated and also majority owned by Lenovo

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.

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.

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'.

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...

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.

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.