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Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI

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

#31

Post by kllrnohj »

d_silin wrote: post #20
gcanyon wrote: post #18

Anyone know how this compares to Apple’s M5 chips? Or is that comparison apples to oranges.

M5 are 9-18 cores and optimized for power-efficiency, those are more like Xeons, with 200-300W TDP, I'd bet.

If M5 has 9-18 cores and takes ~20w, then that's ~1-2w per CPU core. If these are 200-300W, and have ~100-200 CPU cores, then guess what? That's also ~1-2w per CPU core.

Xeons, Epycs, whatever this is - they are all also typically optimized for power efficiency. That's how they can fit so many CPU cores in 200-300W.

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

#32

Post by dmitrygr »

pdpi wrote: post #22
dmitrygr wrote: post #5

> Purpose-Built for Agentic AI From the "fridge purpose-built for storing only yellow tomatoes" and "car only built for people whose last name contains the letter W" series. When can this insanity end? It is a completely normal garden-variety ARM SoC, it'll run Linux, same as every other ARM SoC does. It is as related to "Agentic $whatever" as your toaster is related to it

> It is as related to "Agentic $whatever" as your toaster is related to it These things have hardware FP8 support, and a 1.8TB/s full mesh interconnect between CPUs and GPUs. We can argue about the "agentic" bit, but those are features that don't really matter for any workload other than AI.

mem bw between cores matters for .... literally all workloads that are not single-core (read: all). And FP8 matters not at all cause inference on cpu is too slow to be of any use whatsoever in the days of proper accelerators

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

#34

Post by pdpi »

kibibu wrote: post #29
pdpi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is as related to "Agentic $whatever" as your toaster is related to it These things have hardware FP8 support, and a 1.8TB/s full mesh interconnect between CPUs and GPUs. We can argue about the "agentic" bit, but those are features that don't really matter for any workload other than AI.

Would cloud gaming platforms benefit from the interconnect?

Don't think they would. Games aren't nearly as hungry for memory bandwidth as LLMs are. Also, I expect that the VRAM/GPU/CPU balance would be completely out of whack. Something would be twiddling its thumbs waiting for the rest of the hardware.

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

#35

Post by porphyra »

storus wrote: post #21
gcanyon wrote: post #18

Anyone know how this compares to Apple’s M5 chips? Or is that comparison apples to oranges.

Grace GB10, Vera's predecessor, had a single core performance comparable to M3 so I guess we can expect at least M4 level performance now.

Isn't the GB10 a Mediatek chip and not directly related to the Grace datacenter CPU?

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

#36

Post by kllrnohj »

mikrl wrote: post #28
tencentshill wrote: post #7

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.

>are not competitive in the consumer space AFAIK they still dominate on clock rate, which I was surprised to see when doing some back of the envelope calculations regarding core counts. I felt my 8 core i9 9900K was inadequate, so shopped around for something AMD, and IIRC the core multiplier of the chip I found was dominated by the clock rate multiplier so it’s possible that at full utilization my i9 is still toward…

Your 9900k at 5ghz does work slower than a Ryzen 9800X3D at 5ghz. A lot slower (1700 single core geekbench vs 3300, and just about any benchmark will tell the same story). Clock speed alone doesn't mean anything.

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

#37

Post by wmf »

mikrl wrote: post #28
tencentshill wrote: post #7

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.

>are not competitive in the consumer space AFAIK they still dominate on clock rate, which I was surprised to see when doing some back of the envelope calculations regarding core counts. I felt my 8 core i9 9900K was inadequate, so shopped around for something AMD, and IIRC the core multiplier of the chip I found was dominated by the clock rate multiplier so it’s possible that at full utilization my i9 is still toward…

A 9700X is twice the performance of a 9900K and M5 Max is almost 3X the performance. The megahertz myth is a myth.

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

#40

Post by dwb »

dpe82 wrote: post #9
dmitrygr wrote: post #5

> Purpose-Built for Agentic AI From the "fridge purpose-built for storing only yellow tomatoes" and "car only built for people whose last name contains the letter W" series. When can this insanity end? It is a completely normal garden-variety ARM SoC, it'll run Linux, same as every other ARM SoC does. It is as related to "Agentic $whatever" as your toaster is related to it

The power and importance of marketing is deeply underappreciated by us technical types.

I don’t underappreciate it, but I do despise it.
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