Rosa Takes a Stand
Nvidia has teased details of its forthcoming Rosa CPU, the successor to Vera, which is based on Olympus cores. Rosa will integrate the new Rigel core (named after the low-cost oscilloscope supplier). The company writes it will deliver “higher per-core performance than Olympus while keeping the same silicon footprint. Key improvements include better instruction delivery, a larger L2 cache and more efficient memory handling.”
In a blog post, Nvidia went on to state that companies have found Vera much faster at analytics (Starburst), data streaming (Redpanda), repository cloning, and sandbox cloning than x86 processors. Nvidia explains its philosophy as designing CPUs that perform well per core, have generous memory bandwidth, and have predictable latency.
The real key is the bandwidth. Vera uses LPDDR memory, harnessing wide interfaces to deliver 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth, which is amortized among 96 cores. AMD Epyc, by contrast, has half this memory bandwidth and can amortize it among twice as many cores. AMD offers models with fewer cores, however. Nonetheless, Nvidia is staking out a clear value proposition and incumbent CPU suppliers can’t afford to ignore its threat.
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