It took 35 years to see Arm’s first branded chip

After more than 35 years spent exclusively licensing its designs to companies such as Apple and Nvidia, Arm has taken an unexpected step.

The UK-based company, now controlled by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, officially unveiled its first processor developed and produced in-house.

Dubbed Arm AGI CPU, this new hardware marks a clear departure from a decades-long tradition.

Arm AGI CPU is the first chip fully produced by the brand in 35 years

The announcement took place in San Francisco in front of a live audience, accompanied by pre-recorded congratulatory messages from the leaders of tech giants such as Amazon, Google and Nvidia.

This is a transition planned at least since 2023, which finally brings Arm to compete directly on the global hardware supply market.

The new product is designed to address a highly specific need of modern servers, namely the management of workloads related to artificial intelligence and so-called autonomous agents.

Although the name ‘AGI’ might evoke the concept of artificial general intelligence, executives clarified that the processor focuses on optimization of inference, without claiming to reach that theoretical milestone.

Based on the proven Neoverse architecture, the processor boasts up to 136 cores per unit and allows to install 64 CPUs in a single air-cooled rack server.

According to early company statements, this architecture delivers double the performance per watt compared to traditional x86 CPUs, significantly reducing memory bottlenecks.

The importance of processors has surged in recent months. While GPUs continue to attract great attention for model training, CPUs find themselves needing to manage thousands of distributed tasks, requiring memory allocation and moving data from one system to another.

On this delicate front, big manufacturers like Intel and AMD have begun experiencing delivery delays due to overwhelming demand, creating supply issues for many companies.

Meta in the lead and the notable absentees

The commercial debut of the processor takes place in collaboration with a partner of absolute prestige. Meta is not only the first official customer to receive the hardware, but is defined as a co-developer of the entire project.

The company led by Mark Zuckerberg, which in the past faced several difficulties in launching its own custom chips, plans to use multiple generations of these processors, making them work in harmony with accelerators from other providers.

Alongside Meta, the list of entities ready to adopt the innovation includes leading names such as OpenAI, Cerebras, Cloudflare, SAP and SK Telecom.

Financial details of the operation and the exact supply volumes remain confidential, but the strategy appears clear: to offer an off-the-shelf solution to those companies that do not have the immense resources necessary to produce a processor in-house.

However, while much of the industry welcomed the news with enthusiasm, the silence of Qualcomm drew a lot of attention. The American company has remained absent from the ranks of supporters, a detail that many attribute to the fierce legal battles over licensing terms, won by Qualcomm against Arm last autumn.