This Japanese CPU Threatens AMD and Intel’s Dominance

The processor chip market is almost entirely dominated by Intel and AMD in the desktop CPU space, server-grade CPUs, HPC (high-performance computing) projects, and more. The Japanese tech giant Fujitsu, however, appears to be threatening that dominance with its latest release.

The Fujitsu A64FX, the only ARM-based processor designed from scratch for HPC projects and supercomputers will be deployed in Sandia National Laboratories soon. This 2.2GHz CPU has 48 cores, a peak performance of 3.38 TFLOPS, and has 32GB HBM2 memory.

What really makes the A64FX a noteworthy release is that it provides far higher bandwidth performance (up to 1 TB/s) between the memory and the CPU. Moving data to and from the CPU has been the biggest obstacle so far and this development can easily help overcome.

Although it is only a general-purpose CPU, it even surpasses GPUs from AMD and Nvidia when it comes to performance per watt. It was primarily meant to power Japan’s supercomputer, K, but Fujitsu is also planning to trickle it down to hyperscalers and cloud computing giants to make it accessible to the masses.

The Fujitsu A64FX’s successor, the Fugaku, is expected to be 100 times more powerful and will reportedly reach a staggering 400 petaflops. It is aiming to power the first supercomputer that will hit one exaflop with over half a million processors.