This Tom's Hardware Premium article is free to read with a Tom's Hardware account; no payment necessary. We're offering free access from August 23 to 26 so you can read all of our reporting from Hot Chips.When Arm introduced its AGI data center CPU, which it will ship starting in late 2026, the company revealed key specifications but omitted many technical details. It said nothing about the processor's performance at the time. This week at Hot Chips 2026, Arm filled many gaps about the architecture and design decisions of its AGI CPU, disclosed that the processor works as planned, published planned configurations, and said it is on track for commercial shipments in the coming months. Many coresArm's AGI is a dual-chiplet data center processor that packs 64, 128, or 136 Neoverse V3 cores (10-wide frontend and decode, 10-wide dispatch, 8-wide retire, 384+ entry OoO window) running at 2.80 GHz – 3.70 GHz. The processor is equipped with two 128-bit vector engines and 2MB of L2 cache per core, as well as up to 272 MB of system-level cache. Each CSS V3 chiplet consists of 50 billion transistors, contains 70 V3 cores, a six-channel memory subsystem supporting up to 3 TB of DDR5-8800 memory (6 TB per socket), and connects to its sibling using a 16 ×16 UCIe macros running at 32 GT/s with an aggregated bandwidth of 2 TB/s. On the I/O side of things, Arm's AGI has 96 PCIe 6.0 lanes utilizing the CXL 3.0 protocol on top for memory expansion, four PCIe 4.0 lanes, and I3C, I2C, and SPI interfaces. The CPU has a thermal design power of 300W.(Image credit: Arm)At a high level, Arm's AGI does not look too different from CPUs from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia: it has many cores, plenty of cache, a high-performance memory subsystem, and dozens of PCIe lanes with CXL. However, several design choices from Arm buck some usual trends from other CPU makers. Unorthodox design choicesThe first thing that catches the eye is that Arm chose two largely self-contained SoC chiplets made on TSMC's N3P technology, which places both compute and I/O on the same die, and decided not to go with the usual heterogeneous multi-chiplet designs used by AMD, Intel, and now Nvidia, all of whom separate compute and I/O chiplets. While AMD, Intel, and Nvidia use their heterogeneous multi-chiplet approach to pack more compute capability and deliver more performance, it looks like Arm's decision is fundamental to its combination of enormous memory bandwidth (844.8 GB/s when used with DDR5-8800, though such memory still has to make it to the market) and