Phoronix conducted an exclusive round of testing with NVIDIA's latest "Vera" CPU, showcasing early benchmarks that highlight NVIDIA's advancements in custom CPU design. The initial results indicate that this Arm-based CPU platform is powerful enough to outperform the latest Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC models in the data center sector. The "Vera" CPU is equipped with 88 custom Armv9.2 "Olympus" cores, featuring 176 threads through physical resource partitioning. These custom cores support native FP8 processing, allowing certain AI workloads to be executed directly on the CPU with a 6x128-bit SVE2 implementation. The chip offers 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth and supports up to 1.5 TB of LPDDR5X memory in the SOCAMM2 format. A second-generation Scalable Coherency Fabric provides 3.4 TB/s of bisection bandwidth, connecting the cores across a unified monolithic die and eliminating the latency issues common in chiplet architectures.

For comparison, Phoronix tested single and dual Intel Xeon "Granite Rapids" 6980P CPUs, as well as AMD EPYC "Turin" and "Turin Dense" models like the AMD EPYC 9755, 9575F, and 9475F. They also included NVIDIA's first-generation "Grace" design based on Arm Neoverse V2 cores. NVIDIA allowed only a specific subset of tests on this pre-release chip, including standard workloads like code compilation, stream memory performance, video encoding, Python/Java, and database performance. In the geometric mean of all test results, NVIDIA's "Vera" topped the chart, performing nearly 11% better than AMD's most advanced designs and about 55.3% better than the best single-socket Intel Xeon. It also outperformed dual-socket configurations, suggesting that some workloads have scaling issues across multiple sockets. These limited results place "Vera" above any Arm-based design, with a 450 W TDP for the CPU and 50 W for the 768 GB memory pool.

NVIDIA is projected to sell about $20 billion worth of "Vera" and "Grace" CPUs, tapping into a $200 billion Total Addressable Market (TAM) with its standalone offerings. As NVIDIA partners with every major hyperscaler to supply "Vera" CPU racks, we are starting to see many deployments across infrastructure providers for their own use cases and offerings to third-party customers. This approach allows NVIDIA to tap into a massive market, potentially propelling it to become one of the largest CPU makers this year and likely for years to come.