Arm unveils 136-core server CPU aimed at Xeon and Epyc

Arm has unveiled its new server processor, named AGI, a high-core-count chip designed for data centers and AI workloads. The company says the chip is on track to enter commercial shipments in the coming months, giving Arm a new contender to compete directly with server CPUs from Intel and AMD.

Arm AGI uses two largely self-contained chiplets manufactured by TSMC using its N3P process. The processor will be available with 64, 128 or 136 Neoverse V3 cores running at 2.8 to 3.7 GHz. Each chiplet physically contains 70 cores, with four disabled in the 136-core version to improve manufacturing yields. Each core has two 128-bit vector engines and 2 MB of L2 cache, while the processor offers up to 272 MB of system-level cache.

The chiplets are connected using UCIe at 32 GT/s, with an aggregate bandwidth of up to 2 TB/s. Unlike some competing chiplet designs, each AGI chiplet contains its own CPU cores, memory controllers and I/O components. This means that accesses to local memory do not have to cross the chiplet interconnect, helping reduce latency. Arm says the processor can achieve DRAM access latency below 100 ns for local memory.

Memory is one of the processor's main strengths. Each chiplet has a six-channel DDR5 controller, providing up to 844.8 GB/s of combined memory bandwidth. The processor supports DDR5-8800 and up to 6 TB of memory per socket. Arm has also included mechanisms for prioritizing memory traffic and managing contention between CPU cores and I/O devices.

For expansion, AGI provides 96 PCIe 6.0 lanes with CXL 3.0 support, allowing memory expansion, along with four PCIe 4.0 lanes and I3C, I2C and SPI interfaces. The processor has a 300 W TDP.

Arm is positioning AGI primarily for AI servers and agentic AI systems, where memory bandwidth and latency can be critical for performance. The company claims that servers based on the new processor could deliver up to twice the performance per rack of systems using modern x86 processors. However, this figure is based on Arm's estimates rather than independent testing.

With AGI, Arm is taking another step into a server market traditionally dominated by x86 CPUs. Commercial availability of Arm AGI is expected to begin within the next few months.