Phoronix Shows Nvidia Vera to be Among the Fastest Server Processors
Phoronix has tested Nvidia Vera on a selected set of benchmarks, revealing the 88-core Arm-compatible microprocessor to be competitive with a comparable selection of AMD Epyc setups. It’s also competitive on a per-core basis.
Where Vera shines is on any workload stressing memory bandwidth, such as Stream memory benchmarks, FFT computation, and the ClickHouse database. Vera delivers up to 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth, double that of the best Epyc competitor. Vera is super-dimensioned in that regard because its primary use is alongside the Rubin GPU, despite Nvidia offering it for general use. Owing to their role in moving data from main memory to the GPU, I like to describe GPU-attached microprocessors as the world’s most complex DMA engines.
Nvidia cherry-picked these tests. However, they are diverse enough to conclude that Vera’s Olympus core performs similarly to the best in class, an impressive showing for Nvidia’s server-CPU debut. Other Arm CPUs—particularly those from Arm itself—must perform similarly or leave customers wondering why bother? As for x86, its share is getting whittled down as hyperscalers deploy Arm-based chips. Intel is especially getting squeezed, facing Arm processors on one side and a better executing AMD on the other.
