The Linux specialists over at Phoronix have conducted the first tests of Nvidia’s Vera CPU, comparing it to Intel’s Xeon CPUs and AMD’s Epyc chips. Early performance results suggest it’s plenty powerful, although power draw was high. The benchmarks were selected by Nvidia; however, we’ll want to see less-biased test results to draw a firm conclusion.
Vera is equipped with 88 Olympus ARM cores and supports 176 simultaneous threads. It supports up to 1.5 TB of LPDDR5X memory with up to 1.2 TB/s of bandwidth. That’s impressive on paper, and it may be that real-world performance backs it up.
In the overall geometric mean across all tests, Vera outperformed all Epyc and Xeon CPUs and improved performance over the last-generation Grace design by over 50%. That’s a big win for ARM, especially since it often seems to compete directly with dual Epyc CPUs.
Nvidia comes with 88 cores and offers up to 1.2 TB/s in memory bandwidth.
Credit: Nvidia
However, those results weren’t repeated across every test, and Nvidia’s selection of benchmarks adds a heavy caveat to any and all results here.
In a performance per-core test using Gem5 compilation, AMD’s Epyc 9575F stole the top slot by a sizeable margin. AMD chips won out in Timed Godot Game Engine compilation tests, too. There was some back-and-forth jostling in AI performance when running Python benchmarks, and Encoding tests suggest AMD chips are very competitive with Vera, beating it in a number of tests.
What can be said for certain is that Vera is the fastest ARM CPU ever made, and even at its 500W combined TDP with LPDDR5X memory, it’s likely to be hotly competitive when made widely available. Since it’ll be sold alongside Nvidia’s Rubin GPUs, it’ll make for an attractive package for potential buyers.
That said, it’s taken AMD a long time to make its presence felt in the server market, after many years of Intel dominance. While Nvidia might have a compelling alternative in Vera, it will need to contend with a lot of embedded systems that, in many cases, value stability and upgradeability over raw performance.
It will also need to face off against a next-generation Zen 6 design from AMD and Intel Diamond Rapid CPUs launching later this year or early 2027. That’s the real competition for Vera, rather than the existing chips.
