Nvidia's first in-house CPU benchmarked, beats x86 and ARM chips alike but only in Nvidia-sanctioned tests

The first true Nvidia CPU has been benchmarked and found to beat, well, just about everything. The catch? While this is an independent test, Nvidia dictated the kinds of workloads that could be assessed.

We speak, of course, of Nvidia’s Vera CPU, part of the company’s upcoming nexty-gen Vera Rubin AI platform. Vera contains a CPU core known as Olympus, and the reason why it’s the first “true” Nvidia CPU is because those cores were designed in-house by Nvidia to use the Arm instruction set. Previous Nvidia CPUs, such as Grace, used CPU cores designed by a third party, such as Arm itself.

The first generation of Vera is an 88 core chip with support for 176 software threads. Nvidia has said it offers double the performance of the Grace CPU.

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Anywho, Phoronix.com did the benchmarking and we’re not exactly talking gaming here, people. That website’s audience is pretty technical, arguably with a bit of an enterprise bent.

So, the benchmarks included the likes of code compilation, Python performance, Open JDK Java workloads and so on. That said, AV1 and 7-Zip benchmarks were also on the list, which are relevant to consumer PCs.

Nvidia Vera CPU

(Image credit: Nvidia)

As it happens, Vera traded blows with AMD’s Epyc server chips for video encoding and pretty much rubbed the Intel Xeon competition out. As for 7-Zip, Vera’s per-core performance was getting on for 20% better than any x86 CPU.

Overall, in Phoronix’s geomean of results, Vera beat the best AMD Epyc chip by about 10% and walloped Intel’s flagship Xeon CPU by over 50%.

Phoronix also claims that Vera easily has the measure of pretty much any Arm CPU for servers, though figures weren’t provided. “Vera is much more performant than what we have seen out of the likes of Ampere Computing or the custom in-house Arm solutions at public cloud providers like Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure,” the site said.

There was no mention of Qualcomm or Apple CPUs, both of which obviously use the Arm instruction set and are capable of very impressive per-core performance.

What can be concluded from all this? Nvidia seems to have a very performant CPU core on its hands in the Olympus core. How relevant that is for PC gaming is less clear.

Nvidia’s upcoming N1x chip for the PC, as far as we know, uses off-the-shelf cores designed by Arm, not the new Olympus core. However, if Nvidia is committed to producing Arm CPUs for the PC, it seems reasonable to expect that the company might unify its efforts, just as AMD and Intel do with its consumer and enterprise CPU core designs.

And so Olympus, or perhaps a successor CPU architecture that follows it, could be the basis for future consumer and gaming PC processors from Nvidia. And on this first showing, it looks like Nvidia might just come up with something pretty awesome. Just don’t expect to see it in an actual PC anytime soon. The N1x chip isn’t even out yet, after all.