The New Stack Podcast

Why CPUs still matter in the age of AI agents

The New Stack Podcast

Show Notes

As AI evolves from conversational chatbots to autonomous agents, CPUs are becoming an increasingly important part of the infrastructure equation. In this episode, The New Stack speaks with Bhumik Patel of Arm and Mo Farhat of Google about how CPUs act as an “air traffic controller” for agentic workloads, handling orchestration, data preparation, semantic search, vector databases, code execution and API calls alongside GPUs and TPUs. Smaller AI models, including summarizers and evaluators, can also run effectively on CPUs for specialized tasks.

More from The New Stack Podcast

Oct 7, 2026

Kubernetes has become the dominant container orchestration platform, used by more than 80% of container users, but widespread adoption hasn’t eliminated tensions between developers and operations teams. Developers value Kubernetes for its self-service capabilities and ability to move quickly, while operations teams prioritize stability, governance and controlled change. In this episode, HPE Fellow David Estes explains how those competing priorities are becoming more challenging as applications spread across hybrid and edge environments and AI inference workloads increase demand for GPU scheduling and rapid capacity scaling.

Oct 6, 2026

Open-source technology has played a foundational role in the AI boom, giving companies the flexibility to scale unprecedented computing workloads across providers and hardware. OpenAI, for example, used Kubernetes as early as 2018 to balance compute across its own data centers, AWS and Azure — years before ChatGPT brought generative AI into the mainstream.

Oct 5, 2026

Dynatrace sells software that monitors companies’ apps and infrastructure and wants its AI agents to make engineers’ jobs easier. An agent that gets in the way is a bad agent and should be dropped, said Sean O’Dell, a principal product marketing manager at the company.

Oct 1, 2026

For many developers, turning an AI-generated prototype into maintainable software requires more than generating code—it requires infrastructure, collaboration, testing and review. In this episode of The New Stack podcast, Bit Cloud founder and CEO Ran Mizrahi discusses Bit Cloud 2.0 and Hope, the company’s AI builder, and how they connect application creation with the work that follows.

Sep 30, 2026

CloudBees CEO Mo Plassnig is leading the CI/CD company through a major transformation as generative AI reshapes software development. Returning to CloudBees eight years after joining through its acquisition of CodeShip, which he co-founded, Plassnig says the emergence of generative AI renewed his interest in DevOps and the opportunities ahead.

See all episodes →