Fujitsu, Supermicro, team for Arm-based servers

Fujitsu on Wednesday announced a collaboration that Supermicro to build liquid-cooled servers based on the Japanese giant’s forthcoming Arm-based MONAKA processor.

Fujitsu largely walked away from non-x86 servers in 2022 when it announced the end of its mainframes and Unix servers.

A year later, it revealed plans to release a successor to the A64FX processor it built for use in supercomputers. The new chip, dubbed MONAKA, was pitched as having “ultra-low voltage” requirements, boasting 144 Arm v9 cores, and suited to HPC, AI, and analytics workloads. 2027 was set as the date for its debut.

On Wednesday, Supermicro and Fujitsu detailed plans to “combine their technical capabilities and world-class global reach to offer a market-leading server portfolio.”

Supermicro’s “Building Block” approach to server design, which offers modular designs that customers can assemble into rigs tailored to their needs, will be used for the new server range.

All of which means Fujitsu will be back in the slightly funky server caper, albeit with a partner to do the mucky business of designing and building hardware.

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“As the use of AI continues to grow, demand for data center capacity is rising faster than what can be supplied, and one of the biggest challenges is efficiently meeting growing power consumption requirements,” stated Fujitsu. “A key focus will be bringing together Fujitsu and Supermicro expertise to further develop rack-scale liquid cooling solutions.”

The presence of liquid cooling is interesting, given Fujitsu’s pledge that MONAKA will sip energy – as is often the case with Arm silicon. Liquid cooled Arm-based systems are not unheard of. For example, the Fugaku Supercomputer is based on Fujitsu’s Arm-based A64FX processors uses liquid cooling.

The focus on developing liquid-cooled systems suggests MONAKA systems will target AI and HPC workloads, a growing segment.

Meanwhile, Fujitsu subsidiary Fsas Technologies “will provide AI platform-based generative AI solutions globally that combine Supermicro’s GPU server products and implementation support services for data center operators and enterprises.”

Fsas was spun out in December 2023 to run Fujitsu’s PC, server, and storage business. ®