Nvidia Vera CPU Benchmarks: Olympus Cores Delivering Great Performance

The Olympus CPU cores demonstrate a great improvement over any previous Arm-based server CPU cores.

Nevertheless, when browsing the results, there are several things that must be kept in mind:

1. Much of the advantage of the NVIDIA Vera CPU is caused not by having better CPU cores, but by having a much faster memory interface than the CPUs to which it has been compared.

2. These benchmarks have been specifically approved by NVIDIA, as being workloads where Vera is competitive. It was forbidden to publish other benchmarks. There are plenty of other benchmarks, especially for scientific/technical computing, where Vera would not be competitive with x86 CPUs.

3. Nowadays, AMD Zen 5 still beats Vera in most benchmarks of interest, but it is already an ancient CPU core. Over its lifetime, NVIDIA Vera will compete with AMD Zen 6, which will be launched in a few months from now and which is expected to be much faster than Zen 5, including by having a faster and wider memory interface. Also with Intel, while Granite Rapids looks rather pathetic nowadays, the future Diamond Rapids should be greatly improved and it will be the competitor overlapping with Vera in its lifetime.

This is going to be a small fortune I imagine. The closest AMD processors is about 10k usd per cpu + ram etc. 35k - 60k depending on amount of RAM?

1.2TB/s memory bandwidth from a CPU. Oh boy. What the fuck is Intel doing all this time and can’t deliver equivalent performance?

The design and symmetry of that PCB is oddly satisfying.

Also, does that mean that once the AI bubble pops, Nvidia come come to the consumer market with a powerful ARM gaming SoC?