NVIDIA releases Vera CPU benchmarks, claims 2x agent speed over x86

NVIDIA on November 5 released new benchmark results for its Vera CPU, a processor designed for agentic AI workloads. The company said that in a 100-megawatt data-center comparison, Vera delivered twice the agent execution speed of the most energy-efficient x86 processor and 1.6 times more concurrently running agents per watt than the fastest x86 processor.

Early customer tests: Perplexity reports about 1.5x faster

NVIDIA cited test results from several early users. Perplexity said Vera ran Computer-style workflows about 1.5 times faster than its current production reference in production-style tests and started concurrent sandboxes up to 1.9 times faster, and plans to deploy Vera in an upcoming production system. DeepInfra measured bare-metal orchestration steps at 29 milliseconds on Vera, against 35 milliseconds on AMD Zen 5, 51 on Intel Granite Rapids and 64 on Sapphire Rapids.

Daytona reported that Vera prepared 1,000 sandboxes in 10.8 seconds, compared with 32.3 seconds for AMD's EPYC 9575F and 88.4 seconds for the EPYC 9755. DuckDB reported Vera ran 1.53–1.61 times faster in its power test and 1.37–1.41 times faster in its throughput test than an Intel Xeon 6 baseline.

88-core Arm design aimed at agentic computing

Vera uses 88 custom Olympus cores, supplying 176 threads through Spatial Multithreading, with up to 1.2 TB/s of LPDDR5X memory bandwidth and up to 1.5 TB of memory. It can serve as the host CPU in Vera Rubin systems or as a standalone processor for agentic AI, reinforcement learning, data processing and analytics. NVIDIA said agentic workloads constantly switch between GPU reasoning and CPU tool execution, making the traditional x86 host processor a bottleneck that Vera was redesigned to remove.

The figures above come from tests published by NVIDIA and its partners, not from independent third-party comparisons, and NVIDIA has not disclosed a price for Vera. The Vera Rubin platform entered full production on October 21, and Oracle has offered Vera Rubin NVL72 systems on its cloud since October 27.

(Image: Kad8)