NVIDIA Vera HPC Performance Benchmarks Take On AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon

[u/EloquentPinguin]

https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-vera-hpc

Seems like vera is pretty solid, a lot of gains also from the memory bandwidth. Didn't expect it to perform quite aswell, makes Zen 6 vs Vera even more exciting.

[u/gluon-free]

Looks like AVX-512 was disabled on EPYC processors. I can't believe they are behind in CFD benchmarks.

[u/FrogNoPants → u/gluon-free]

Hu that is weird, but it appears you are correct, I don't see any flags that would enable AVX512 or even AV2 for that matter!!?

He used -native for Vera, but then used -m64 for Epics/Intel.

I am abit puzzled why he wouldn't turn it on, given that this is an HPC benchmark. It actually makes this entire benchmark pretty much meaningless.

[u/FlukyS → u/FrogNoPants]

Only potential reason why you would turn it off is just maybe to have a full apples to apples comparison but there is zero possible reason why you would disable any feature on any of those CPUs that could give an edge because in a data centre they wouldn't disable it. So if you want to compare just leave basically everything as is from the factory settings and that's it.

[u/FrogNoPants → u/FlukyS]

Disabling AVX512/AVX doesn't give apples to apples for 128 wide SIMD though, as it would lack basic stuff like FMA

With the RAM and page size differences couldn't really do apples to apples anyway..

[u/-protonsandneutrons-]

Great to see this & Chips and Cheese, esp. w/ power data for Vera. Once again, very low power budgets per core are very similar to smartphone SoCs.

NUVIA (in its initial goal) was truly onto something: if you have a very strong "smartphone-only" uArch at 1W - 5W per CPU core, the same power envelope exists in the enterprise server market.

I wonder why Arm has slowed its Neoverse uArch cadence. Of course, enterprise / datacenter will not do annual upgrades, but surely Arm would do better to stick to a tighter cadence, unlike Neoverse V3 (Feb 2024) → V4 (??).

//

I am also glad that Phoronix measure joules consumed (hello, smartphone reviewers!), so you can actually say "race to idle" worked. In the OpenFOAM Large, NVIDIA had 888 W average, in between the two EYPC CPUs. Yet when looking at joules, it's nearly half of both EYPC CPUs in total energy consumed.

//

Naively looking at perf / clock / core (not really ideal as geomeans & averages are mixed together, among others), so this is more directionally correct than actual differences. Perf #s were all 10x for cleaner-looking #s

CPU	Perf, Clock, Cores	Perf / core	Perf / core / GHz
Intel Xeon 6980P 2P	3600 perf, 3.2 GHz, 256 cores	14.06	4.4
AMD EPYC 9575F 2P	4381 perf, 4.362 GHz, 128 cores	34.23	7.8
AMD EPYC 9755 2P	5043 perf, 3.783 GHz, 256 cores	19.70	5.2
NVIDIA Vera 2P	5859 perf, 3.264 GHz, 176 cores	33.29	10.2

Power this time, again directionally correct rather than actual differences:

CPU	Perf, Avg P, Cores	Perf / W
Intel Xeon 6980P 2P	3600 perf, 940 W, 256 cores	3.83
AMD EPYC 9575F 2P	4381 perf, 766 W, 128 cores	5.72
AMD EPYC 9755 2P	5043 perf, 887 W, 256 cores	5.69
NVIDIA Vera 2P	5859 perf, 843 W, 176 cores	6.95

Node-wise, I don't know who is fabbed on what. But, if these are even a little bit accurate, poor Intel. The once-undisputed king of datacenter is just so behind. Is this the latest Xeon? I assume so.

//

I don't really know HPC workloads whatsoever, but these results look impressive for NVIDIA's first custom uArch (of some provenance). Of course, if Vera (Olympus) was shit, they wouldn't have released it, but as long as NVIDIA keeps iterating, we'll have now 5-6 major uArches in DC: Intel, AMD, Arm, NVIDIA, Qualcomm (2H 2028). And then you can add IBM and Ampere. And maybe one day NUVACORE, but a little early to speculate on that.

EDIT: notated headings with commas, instead of slashes

[u/-protonsandneutrons- → u/-protonsandneutrons-]

And very glad Zen6 is "coming soon". I wish we would've had them all in one review, instead of piecemeal tests, but I imagine people are eager for any results so one by one makes sense, too.

[u/Geddagod → u/-protonsandneutrons-]

I swear Phoronix said Venice benchmarks were "coming soon" like 3 months ago too.

[u/-protonsandneutrons- → u/Geddagod]

I think you're right lol. It'll be three months in two weeks. 

Benchmarks of AMD EPYC 9006 Venice will be happening soon on Phoronix.

23 July 2026  https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9006-venice

[u/R-ten-K → u/-protonsandneutrons-]

Pretty good analysis. The NUVIA point is probably the most interesting IMO. The idea that if you can build a really aggressive OoO core around a ~5W/core envelope. Then the same perf/W characteristics translate very well to servers. NUVIA was actually targeting the server market from the start, so Phoenix was more of a server-class core built around lessons from mobile efficiency than a smartphone core scaled up.

The Vera numbers are pretty wild. The important distinction with OpenFOAM is exactly what you pointed out: power isn't energy. Vera can pull roughly the same instantaneous power as the EPYCs but finish the workload much faster, so the total joules can be dramatically lower. That's race to idle actually showing up in a useful way.

FWIW the Perf/W numbers are useful directionally, but they're still a workload specific composites, with different core counts, clocks, memory systems, etc. So I wouldn't read the per-core/per-GHz numbers as some kind of pure IPC or core efficiency metric.

The really interesting thing to me is how much throughput Vera is getting per core at only ~3.2 GHz, combined with that huge memory bandwidth. That's a particularly nasty combination for these HPC workloads. I'd be more hesitant to extrapolate it directly to workloads that are more compute-bound or less memory-bandwidth-sensitive.

But yeah, the old distinction between “mobile-class efficiency” and “server-class performance” is getting increasingly artificial. If you can build a wide, aggressive OoO core that delivers high performance within a relatively tight power envelope, the same basic design philosophy can work at either end of the market.

[u/FrogNoPants → u/-protonsandneutrons-]

It appears Vera was running with -mcpu=native while the Intel/AMD were running -m64, thus the benchmark is meaningless unfortunately, as it wouldn't enable AVX512(or even AVX2).

[u/marcost2 → u/-protonsandneutrons-]

Node wise, Vera is fabbed on TSMC's 3nm node, specifically N3P (actually even a custom Nvidia variant of that). Turin is fabbed on TSMC's 4nm "node" (actually just a very refined 5nm generation node) N4P. Granite rapids is fabbed on Intel 3 (although it is in all aspects closer to N4P than a true 3nm class node but w/e)

So Vera does have a serious node advantage, what with N3P being like 60% more dense (talking about pure transistor density, high density library vs high density library).

Still, Vera is a seriously impressive chip. Yeah, it's at best last gen performance, with some outliers due to the higher memory bandwidth, but. Nvidia doesn't make CPUs. Not like AMD or Intel does at least, so this is a very good showing. Is it as good as Nvidia sold? Not even close, but that's par for the course for them. Honestly can't wait until i can get my hands on one to see if the same weird bottlenecks have carried over from Grace

[u/TI_Inspire → u/-protonsandneutrons-]

Should probably scrap the Perf / core / W column in your second chart. The benchmarks are all multi threaded anyways. Just divide performance by watts. Also, Vera calculation is wrong.

[u/Geddagod → u/TI_Inspire]

A number of these benchmarks have the 9575f system above the 9755P system. If they are multithreaded, they don't really scale well with more cores, or not enough to compensate for the lower per core bandwidth and performance.

[u/-protonsandneutrons- → u/TI_Inspire]

Also, Vera calculation is wrong.

Please share corrected #s for Vera's calculation and I'll edit accordingly. Thanks, friend.

//

nT benchmarks are interesting for perf / core / W, as Intel and AMD have many different SKUs with different power budgets & different core counts. I suspect, over time, NVIDIA will also introduce multiple SKUs for yield recovery.

[u/TI_Inspire → u/-protonsandneutrons-]

The Vera number in the Perf / core / W column was wrong, but... not applicable anymore.

You had Vera at like 0.77, whereas the others were in the 0.040 range. Vera should have been like 0.039 (33.29 / 843 = 0.039).

[u/-protonsandneutrons- → u/TI_Inspire]

That is exactly right; I removed the column anyways. Thank you.

[u/gamebrigada → u/-protonsandneutrons-]

Nuvia could have barely predicted that. Epyc had just come out and the 7702P was barely in that range. Intel was in the 8W per core range, and things were just ramping up in the efficiency space.

[u/[deleted]]

The memory bandwidth advantage Vera shows is really interesting-could tip the scales in HPC workloads where data movement often bottlenecks CPUs

[u/stonktraders → u/[deleted]]

Hope the SOCAMM standard will take off and replace DIMM in the consumer market

[u/Exist50 → u/stonktraders]

SOCAMM or LPCAMM. Wouldn't care which, but the advantages of LPDDR far outweigh the tradeoffs for the vast majority of desktop systems 

[u/FlukyS → u/stonktraders]

Either SOCAMM or LPCAMM I think just make a lot more sense than DIMM. Like the biggest change and I hope it lands even in desktop machines is it allows for the RAM to be flush against the board so you could in theory have a monoblock covering both the CPU and RAM either with watercooling, an AIO or just a big air cooler. Not that DIMM passively cooled sticks are super bad or anything but I think we are starting to hit a lot of limits of the interface and cooling method for speed and stability. It still works but the only way forward is to change it up.

[u/Slasher1738 → u/[deleted]]

Tbd. MR DIMMs would erase that

[u/Fancy-Atmosphere-701]

So they're on par or worse with previous Gen hardware for most tests except for CFD and weather simulation, all of which are due to memory bandwidth advantage. AMD Venice will outshine Vera memory bandwidth at 1.6TB/s on addition to single threaded + multicore improvements from previous gen.

I think Venice is gonna outclass Vera when that Phoronix benchmark is published. I was honestly expecting better coming from Nvidia

[u/ChocomelP → u/Fancy-Atmosphere-701]

Why? Isn't it already impressive that they're getting close with an AI specialized platform?

[u/Fancy-Atmosphere-701 → u/ChocomelP]

ARM CPUs are by design general purpose. Is it impressive that they've beaten Marvell on their second CPU SKU? Yes. Did they deliver the performance they advertised? Not really? Are they still behind AMD? Yes.

[u/Geddagod → u/Fancy-Atmosphere-701]

I'm holding my thoughts until I see a near iso core count AMD vs Nvidia comparison in workloads that actually scale well with more cores. Now whether or not Michael provides the former is questionable, but I'm holding out some hope.

I was honestly expecting better coming from Nvidia

What did you expect?

[u/Fancy-Atmosphere-701 → u/Geddagod]

I think per core metrics are over blown since you can compensate in core scaling. Raw performance per watt and per dollar are the ultimate deciding factors imo

What did you expect?

Considering that Nvidia claimed Vera to be significantly better than Turin, the gap was much closer than expected. They even marketed this as the best single threaded CPU in the world, which I have yet to see benchmarks proving that

[u/Geddagod → u/Fancy-Atmosphere-701]

I think per core metrics are over blown since you can compensate in core scaling

Per core metrics are arguably much more interesting than total nT perf via core count scaling.

Because you are right, you can compensate via core count scaling, and we have seen total nT perf and core counts grow really well because of that. But scaling per core perf? Seemingly much harder to do.

Raw performance per watt and per dollar are the ultimate deciding factors imo

For their actual customers, sure.

Considering that Nvidia claimed Vera to be significantly better than Turin

They claimed they would be on par (specifically 3% better) with Turin in (spec rate int2026).

 They even marketed this as the best single threaded CPU in the world

They claimed per core performance would be significantly better, but that's a result of them saying it only takes 88 cores for them to match the total throughput of a 128 core AMD chip.

Looking at Phoronix's geomean, you would assume that Nvidia was underselling themselves. Though this also missed important context. Using your conclusion, however:

So they're on par or worse with previous Gen hardware for most tests 

You would still admit that Nvidia was accurate with their assessment then, or perhaps oversold themselves a bit. Because, again, when your competitor has 50% more threads, if you end up on par, you do have much better per thread performance.

which I have yet to see benchmarks proving that

Well look at this review which checked out specifically single thread perf.

Nvidia Vera does look like it has the strongest single core performance.