(Credit: AMD)
AMD isn't taking Nvidia's recent performance projections on its new Vera CPUs lying down. After Team Green approved some Phoronix test results showing Vera beating AMD's Epyc server chips in several tests, AMD has released estimated comparisons of its next-generation Venice Epyc chips based on its Zen 6 architecture, Tom's Hardware reports. It claims the per-rack performance of its new chips could be more than three times higher than Vera's.
Nvidia's new 88-core Vera CPUs will pair up with its Rubin GPUs as part of its major AI server rack hardware package later this year. It can support up to 176 simultaneous threads, handle up to 1.5TB of LPDDR5X memory, and should be far faster than its last-generation Grace designs. By the recent Phoronix numbers, they're faster than AMD and Intel alternatives, too, but AMD claims what's coming next should take the crown.
AMD's numbers are a little bit specific, though. It's not releasing like-for-like performance results; instead, it's showing rack performance with a 100 kW deployment. It's an estimation, too, not actual testing, because it doesn't have Vera chips on hand. That doesn't tell us exactly what to expect from its next-gen Epyc designs on a per-chip or per-core basis, but it's still claiming big performance wins.
The 256-core Epyc results, for example, are based on scaling up the Epyc 9965 results from internal testing by 1.7 times. Because AMD believes the combination of Zen 6 architecture, TSMC 2nm node, and additional 64 cores will deliver that kind of performance leap.
AMD even says in the methodology that the results are "intended to provide directional comparison rather than direct measured rack benchmarks."
With that dizzying list of caveats and provisos out of the way, AMD claims that if a Vera CPU's performance is normalized at 1.0, its Epyc 9965 chip would be 2.37, and its next-generation Venice 256C could be 3.3. This is based on this list of benchmarks:
SPEC CPU 2017
Server-side Java based on SPECjbb 2015
WRK Tool for load on an NGINX web server
Redis-benchmark for in-memory workloads
Memory caching with Memcached
Database performance with TPROC-C on MySQL
These are effectively measuring agentic AI performance, so none of this is really for us. AMD is claiming its next AI CPU will be better than Nvidia's new one.
But! It's using the Zen 6 architecture built on the new TSMC 2nm process node, and these two things will be true of the Zen 6 Ryzen CPUs for the rest of us, too. If AMD can manage anything close to a 1.7x performance jump in reality, with "only" a 1/3 bump in cores, the new node and architecture must be doing some heavy lifting too.
With Intel's Nova Lake shaping up to be something quite special, I'm excited to see how these next-generation chips compare early next year. Much more than I am for Epyc and Vera.
About Our Expert
Jon Martindale is a tech journalist from the UK, with 20 years of experience covering all manner of PC components and associated gadgets. He's written for a range of publications, including ExtremeTech, Digital Trends, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, and Lifewire, among others. When not writing, he's a big board gamer and reader, with a particular habit of speed-reading through long manga sagas.Â
Jon covers the latest PC components, as well as how-to guides on everything from how to take a screenshot to how to set up your cryptocurrency wallet. He particularly enjoys the battles between the top tech giants in CPUs and GPUs, and tries his best not to take sides.
Jon's gaming PC is built around the iconic 7950X3D CPU, with a 7900XTX backing it up. That's all the power he needs to play lightweight indie and casual games, as well as more demanding sim titles like Kerbal Space Program. He uses a pair of Jabra Active 8 earbuds and a SteelSeries Arctis Pro wireless headset, and types all day on a Logitech G915 mechanical keyboard.
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