Validating a core to server standards takes significantly longer.
V4 cores should be out this year using X925 and C1 Ultra-based V5 will probably be 2027-2028.
I suspect that X4 is already fast enough to beat EPYC in per-core performance when using the whole chip. ARM caught up/passed x86 in IPC all the way back around A77/78 in 2019-2020. They are now much faster per clock and hitting about the same all-core clockspeeds as standard EPYC (let alone zen5c EPYC).
The big issue is that Graviton5 is already starting to hit the market and uses the same v3 cores. A lot of marketshare for this chip will probably come from taking Ampere customers.
Not sure how to feel about this. Does this mean ARM is slowly moving from just licensing IP to actually competing with companies building on top of it?
This seems bad, doesn’t it? I already know that there has been friction between arm and their customers over higher licensing fees since the IPO just trying to put this in context.
Agreed. The ARM AGI CPU supports a newer version of the vectorized instructions and has matrix math extensions that the AmpereOne M doesn’t. Also has almost twice the memory bandwidth. One paper at least, the AGI CPU seems like a better choice for AI workloads. Ampere is really pushing the AI workload use cases for the AmpereOne M, so this really makes their lives a lot harder.
Softbank still owns 90% of ARM and they finished their acquisition of Ampere only a few months ago in November 2025.
I'm a chip designer and a chip this complicated takes about 3 years from start to actual silicon so it would have started well before Softbank started their acquisition process of Ampere.
The press release says it was co-developed with Meta who has a growing custom chip team. Normally these chips like Amazon's Graviton or Google's Axion are designed for their own data center use only and rented to customers. This ARM chip sounds like Meta and other companies will all be able to buy chips for their own data centers.
I'm guessing Softbank will get ARM and Ampere to align on future chips or just merge Ampere completely into ARM.
I think the only ARM licensee going for the hyperscaler CPU market is Ampere. Amazon and Microsoft make CPUs for themselves and Nvidia’s are aimed exclusively at AI workloads driving their GPUs.
It really is a choice for Arm to use their 2023 based mobile X4 cores instead of their current C1 Ultras for this. Hopefully they step up quickly
Validating a core to server standards takes significantly longer.
V4 cores should be out this year using X925 and C1 Ultra-based V5 will probably be 2027-2028.
I suspect that X4 is already fast enough to beat EPYC in per-core performance when using the whole chip. ARM caught up/passed x86 in IPC all the way back around A77/78 in 2019-2020. They are now much faster per clock and hitting about the same all-core clockspeeds as standard EPYC (let alone zen5c EPYC).
The big issue is that Graviton5 is already starting to hit the market and uses the same v3 cores. A lot of marketshare for this chip will probably come from taking Ampere customers.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506251 (18 minutes older, 6 comments)
This is my condensed version for the SBCwiki documentation focused on the key facts without all the unnecessary marketing around it
This is substantially more useful than the marketing fluff in the press release. Probably would have made sense to post this in that thread though
I added a cost/performance analysis for that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509236 in case anyone's interested.
Not sure how to feel about this. Does this mean ARM is slowly moving from just licensing IP to actually competing with companies building on top of it?
This seems bad, doesn’t it? I already know that there has been friction between arm and their customers over higher licensing fees since the IPO just trying to put this in context.
This is great for consumers. More options leads to more choices means more competition means lower prices. Which group is it bad for?
I wonder what the people at Ampere are thinking right now
Agreed. The ARM AGI CPU supports a newer version of the vectorized instructions and has matrix math extensions that the AmpereOne M doesn’t. Also has almost twice the memory bandwidth. One paper at least, the AGI CPU seems like a better choice for AI workloads. Ampere is really pushing the AI workload use cases for the AmpereOne M, so this really makes their lives a lot harder.
Softbank still owns 90% of ARM and they finished their acquisition of Ampere only a few months ago in November 2025.
I'm a chip designer and a chip this complicated takes about 3 years from start to actual silicon so it would have started well before Softbank started their acquisition process of Ampere.
The press release says it was co-developed with Meta who has a growing custom chip team. Normally these chips like Amazon's Graviton or Google's Axion are designed for their own data center use only and rented to customers. This ARM chip sounds like Meta and other companies will all be able to buy chips for their own data centers.
I'm guessing Softbank will get ARM and Ampere to align on future chips or just merge Ampere completely into ARM.
Wasn’t Ampere just bought by Softbank?
Yes, but they function as sister companies right now rather than one company.
Yeah seems like competing with your customers is a bad idea.
I think the only ARM licensee going for the hyperscaler CPU market is Ampere. Amazon and Microsoft make CPUs for themselves and Nvidia’s are aimed exclusively at AI workloads driving their GPUs.
ARM naming a chip AGI is either the most confident product launch in history or the best marketing we have seen in years. Probably both.
Or for certain people, it makes them cringe a little whenever they see it..
Waiting for ARM-AGI-2
They actually said it’s coming in 2027 and ARM-AGI-3 is marked as future https://xcancel.com/mecoscorner/status/2036510613350785418
I wonder if it's a joke like Arm-Generative-Intelligence or something like that.
They certainly are optimistic
It’s so deliberately misleading.
I can only imagine that their boardroom minutes included heated exchanges between their legal and marketing teams.
Their marketing department is smoking a lot of hopium. I will now think of it as the ARM MatMul Unit.
No, the Arm TPU is coming later.