Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI

nvidianews.nvidia.com

11–20 of 109 posts

Re: Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI

#11

So does this cut out Intel/x86 from all the massive new datacenter buildouts entirely? They've already lost Apple as a customer and are not competitive in the consumer space. I don't see how they can realistically grow at all with x86.

Even Apple hardware looks inexpensive compared to Nvidia's huge premium. And never mind the order backlog.

x86 and Apple already sell CPUs with integrated memory and high bandwidth interconnects. And I bet eventually Intel's beancounter board will wake up and allow engineering to make one, too.

But competition is good for the market.

Re: Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI

#14

I'm assuming this is for tool call and orchestration. I didn't know we needed higher exploitable parallelism from the hardware, we had software bottlenecks (you're not running 10,000 agents concurrently or downstream tool calls) Can someone explain what is Vera CPU doing that a traditional CPU doesn't?

Lots and lots of CPUs pooled. Faster more efficient power RAM accessible to both GPU and CPU. IIUC.

Re: Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI

#16
post #3

It is a 88-core ARM v9 chip, for somewhat more detailed spec.

Hmm, the 128-core Ampere Altra CPU is already available, and in a case from System76. I wonder what else differentiates it.

If they're going to build CPUs I wish they had used Risc-V instead. They are using it somewhat already.

Re: Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI

#17
post #14

I'm assuming this is for tool call and orchestration. I didn't know we needed higher exploitable parallelism from the hardware, we had software bottlenecks (you're not running 10,000 agents concurrently or downstream tool calls) Can someone explain what is Vera CPU doing that a traditional CPU doesn't?

Lots and lots of CPUs pooled. Faster more efficient power RAM accessible to both GPU and CPU. IIUC.

But at what stage are we asking for that RAM? if it's the inference stage then doesn't that belong to the GPUMemory which has nothing to do with the CPU?

I did see they have the unified CPU/GPU memory which may reduce the cost of host/kernel transactions especially now that we're probably lifting more and more memory with longer context tasks.

Re: Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI

#19
Are we rapidly careening towards a world where _only_ AI “computing” is possible?

Wanted to do general purpose stuff? Too bad, we watched the price of everything up, and then started producing only chips designed to run “ai” workloads.

Oh you wanted a local machine? Too bad, we priced you out, but you can rent time with an ai!

Feels like another ratchet on the “war on general purpose computing” but from a rather different direction.

Post reply on HN