Benchmarks show NVIDIA's 88-core Vera CPU beats Intel's Xeon 6980P by 1.55x and quadruples memory bandwidth

CHChubby♨️@kimmonismus

Phoronix just published one of the first public benchmarks of NVIDIA's Vera CPU. I went through the full 11-page review this morning and the results are genuinely impressive. For those who don't follow server hardware: Vera is NVIDIA's new ARM-based data center processor with 88 custom-designed Olympus cores. The idea is straightforward. Agentic AI doesn't just need powerful GPUs. It needs CPUs that can keep up with code execution, tool calls, orchestration and data pipelines, all running concurrently at scale. The numbers are strong. Vera compiled a default Linux kernel in 20 seconds, the fastest result in Phoronix's tested field. Across all tested workloads, it delivered about 1.55x the performance of Intel's Xeon 6980P. Against AMD's EPYC 9575F, it came out about 10% ahead on a geometric mean basis. The memory story might be even more interesting. Vera uses LPDDR5X with up to 1.2 TB/s of bandwidth and delivers more than 4x the memory bandwidth per core compared to traditional x86 server CPUs. In the STREAM TRIAD benchmark, it sustained 90% of its rated peak bandwidth, the highest ratio Phoronix has measured on any CPU. If you're running agentic workloads with dozens of parallel processes and concurrent data queries, that kind of consistent memory performance matters more than core count on a spec sheet. Compared to NVIDIA's own Grace CPU, Vera is 1.63x faster in the geometric mean. That is an unusually large generation-over-generation jump for a CPU. Michael Larabel, who founded Phoronix and has been benchmarking Linux hardware for over two decades, said he's never seen any ARM processor compete with Intel and AMD at this level. I was at GTC in March when Jensen announced Vera. The thesis that agentic AI creates entirely new CPU demand made sense to me then. These benchmarks are the first real numbers behind that thesis. And they deliver. Vera ships to partners in H2 2026. The server CPU market just got a whole lot more interesting. Full 11-page review on Phoronix. Worth your time, all sources below.