Arm says agentic AI needs a new kind of CPU. Intel's DC chief isn't buying it

Interview In recent weeks, the likes of Nvidia and Arm have revealed CPUs designed expressly to run AI agents like OpenClaw.

Kevork Kechichian, who runs Intel's Data Center Group and served as executive vice president of Arm's Solutions Engineering team until last summer, isn't so sure this "new" kind of CPU is really what hyperscalers or enterprises actually need.

His comments came just days after Arm unveiled its full processor design, a chip called the AGI CPU, which it proposes as an agentic AI processor. Nvidia showed off its own agentic compute platform, powered by its in-house Vera CPUs, a week earlier.

After years of GPUs and AI accelerators dominating headlines, CPUs are back in the limelight because those agentic frameworks, tools, API calls, and AI-generated code snippets need to run on something, and it's not GPUs.

Speaking at the Arm Everywhere event in San Francisco ...