The big picture: Despite adopting a strictly multi-core design long ago, modern CPUs are still less efficient than GPUs when processing highly parallel workloads. According to Arm's CEO, however, that is likely to change significantly over the next few years.
During a recent earnings call for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026, Arm executives shared some interesting insights into the company's outlook on the future of computing devices. According to CEO Rene Haas, CPUs will eventually surpass GPUs in terms of total compute cores. And yes, you guessed it: the driver behind this shift is the rapidly growing "agentic AI" economy.
AI agents are being positioned as the next major step in the ongoing evolution of AI applications. Proponents believe that LLM-based agents will soon be capable of automating nearly everything, while critics warn about the systemic risks and potential failures a widespread agent-driven economy could introduce. Microsoft researchers have recently tested AI agents' ability to perform complex tasks, and the results suggest there is still a long road ahead.
Like many executives in today's tech industry, Haas is clearly optimistic about the emerging agentic future. These AI agents will require substantial computing resources to operate across diverse workloads, and the semiconductor industry is expected to adapt accordingly. As a result, CPU core counts in future systems are likely to continue increasing significantly.
The Arm CEO said that the growing prevalence of AI agents will shift the current balance of computing cores between GPUs and CPUs. Future server CPU architectures could include up to four times as many cores as today's designs. Chip manufacturers could also see a new business opportunity worth more than $100 billion by 2030.
Modern GPU-based AI accelerators such as Nvidia's Blackwell or Rubin are approaching their reticle limit, Haas stated. Their size is now constrained by the maximum area a lithography mask can print, while CPUs still have more room to scale. As a result, core counts could double or even quadruple in a relatively short timeframe.
The Arm CEO also highlighted his company's ability to significantly increase core counts in Arm-based CPU designs. The recently launched AGI CPU includes up to 126 cores, while Intel has already developed server (Xeon) CPU designs with up to 288 x86 efficiency cores. AMD is also expected to reach up to 256 cores (with the help of SMT multithreading) with its Zen 6-based Epyc processors.
Haas envisions 256-core and even 512-core CPU designs in the future. With such a massive number of individual computing "brains," Arm is expected to benefit from its architecture's power efficiency advantages over x86-based competitors.