Fujitsu Formally Announces Their MONAKA 144 Core CPU

For two years now we have been curious about the Fujitsu MONAKA CPU since some slides about this Arm-based server processor first appeared and they upstreamed compiler support in GCC 15. This week Fujitsu formally announced the MONAKA CPU and with availability beginning in November.

The Fujitsu MONAKA CPU and Fujitsu MONAKA server are designed for sovereign AI infrastructure. Fujitsu describes the new hardware as having "world-class AI inference performance" and the CPU relies on 2nm 3D-stacked technology.

Fujitsu's new 2nm CPU features a maximum operating frequency of 3.8GHz and supports memory speeds up to 8800MT/s. In this week's press release the MONAKA CPU is described as:

"FUJITSU-MONAKA CPU: Achieving High Performance, High Power Efficiency, and High Security

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. By combining optimal processes for each function, it enhances cost efficiency and achieves high power efficiency and performance through Fujitsu's unique ultra-low voltage operation technology. It delivers world-class computational performance and data supply capabilities with a maximum operating frequency of 3.8GHz and memory transfer speed of 8800MT/s. The CPU provides hardware acceleration for matrix operations, which are central to AI inference, using dedicated instructions. Combined with SVE2 vector operations and software optimization, it achieves twice the throughput for AI inference compared to other CPUs. This enables practical AI inference performance from the CPU alone, offering the flexibility to deploy at the necessary scale even in locations with power and cooling constraints."

The 1U air-cooled Fujitsu MONAKA rackmount server will feature 144 cores at 2.1GHz or if going for liquid cooling will be at 2.9GHz. The 2U rackmountable air-cooled server also runs its 144 ARMv9 cores at 2.1GHz. There is twelve RDIMMs per socket. PCIe Gen6 is supported with MONAKA.

Availability will begin in November and with greater available in Europe in 2027. We'll see if we end up getting (remote) access to MONAKA in due course as should be interesting for performance benchmarking.