Meta Partners With Arm to Build Chipsets for AI Workloads, Unveils Arm AGI CPU

Meta and Arm announced a partnership on Tuesday to jointly develop a new class of CPUs that support heavy artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. These CPUs will be designed to support data centres and large-scale AI deployments, and are not expected to be available to the end consumer. The two companies also unveiled the Arm AGI CPU, the first chipset designed for Meta's data centres. The two entities also confirmed that several generations of chipsets will be co-developed to facilitate parallel, high-performance agentic workloads.

Meta, Arm to Develop AI Chipsets

In a newsroom post, the Menlo Park-based tech giant announced the partnership, detailing the focus area. The collaboration will result in the development of multiple generations of CPUs to address the massive compute demand. These chipsets will be optimised for data centres and large gigawatt-scale AI deployments, to help Meta bring new AI-powered innovations to users.

The first release to come from the partnership is the Arm AGI CPU. Detailed in the chipmaker's blog post, the production-ready silicon was built on the Arm Neoverse platform. It has a dual chiplet design with the memory and I/O on the same die, and a memory latency of sub-100 nanoseconds. It offers 6GB/s memory and a capacity of 6TB per chip. It also supports a frequency of up to 3.7GHz.

“We worked alongside Arm to develop the Arm AGI CPU to deploy an efficient compute platform that significantly improves our data centre performance density and supports a multi-generation roadmap for our evolving AI systems,” said Santosh Janardhan, Head of Infrastructure, Meta.

Meta will serve as both the co-developer and the lead customer of the Arm AGI CPU. The company claimed that it is designed to work alongside its Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) silicon. Additionally, the chipset will also be available to other AI players via Arm. The Meta AI-maker, on the other hand, will release its board and rack designs for the CPU under the Open Compute Project later this year.

Notably, apart from Meta, Arm's Neoverse also serves the large AI and cloud companies, including AWS Graviton, Google Axion, Microsoft Azure Cobalt, and Nvidia Vera.