Nvidia Vera CPU Benchmarks: Olympus Cores Delivering Great Performance | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia Vera CPU Benchmarks: Olympus Cores Delivering Great Performance

phoronix.com

55 pointsnaves23 comments

The Olympus CPU cores demonstrate a great improvement over any previous Arm-based server CPU cores.

Nevertheless, when browsing the results, there are several things that must be kept in mind:

1. Much of the advantage of the NVIDIA Vera CPU is caused not by having better CPU cores, but by having a much faster memory interface than the CPUs to which it has been compared.

2. These benchmarks have been specifically approved by NVIDIA, as being workloads where Vera is competitive. It was forbidden to publish other benchmarks. There are plenty of other benchmarks, especially for scientific/technical computing, where Vera would not be competitive with x86 CPUs.

3. Nowadays, AMD Zen 5 still beats Vera in most benchmarks of interest, but it is already an ancient CPU core. Over its lifetime, NVIDIA Vera will compete with AMD Zen 6, which will be launched in a few months from now and which is expected to be much faster than Zen 5, including by having a faster and wider memory interface. Also with Intel, while Granite Rapids looks rather pathetic nowadays, the future Diamond Rapids should be greatly improved and it will be the competitor overlapping with Vera in its lifetime.

Impressive chip but picked benchmarks where 256 core chips score the same as 128 core (Vera itself has 88 cores)

This is going to be a small fortune I imagine. The closest AMD processors is about 10k usd per cpu + ram etc. 35k - 60k depending on amount of RAM?

The design and symmetry of that PCB is oddly satisfying.

Also, does that mean that once the AI bubble pops, Nvidia come come to the consumer market with a powerful ARM gaming SoC?

I mostly see dollar signs. It's a very dense board and every square inch has a ton of high speed I/O. I imagine there are thousands of buried vias. Economies of scale help and the things being installed also cost a lot, but I'm still curious how much of their BOM cost is board fab.

These things have started to look a lot like big iron CPUs from the late 90s with unusually thicc PCBs, being crammed full of (then cache) memory chips around a huge chip or two in the center, periphery lined with odd high-speed connectors and power delivery etc

Maybe N1/N1X is coming out soon: https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-n1x-20-core-cpu-performan...

> Also, does that mean that once the AI bubble pops, Nvidia come come to the consumer market with a powerful ARM gaming SoC?

Are we rewriting history? Nvidia had consumer ARM SoCs long ago before Qualcomm pushed them out with patents, modems, etc. See: Tegra.

Early day Tegra had quite a bit of Android market share (and they're also currently in the Nintendo Switch).

...and the Nvidia Shield.

1.2TB/s memory bandwidth from a CPU. Oh boy. What the fuck is Intel doing all this time and can’t deliver equivalent performance?

> What the fuck is Intel doing all this time

The thing is, it doesn't have to do anything. It is busy getting bailed out, I guess.

If you don't have to worry about replaceable sticks and users choosing their own memory manufacturer, speed and size then you can shorten the traces and improve connectivity including the bus width and its latency. I can't help but think the DIMM format is coming to an end.

I don't expect them to change their entire pipeline. But surely they could offer a unified RAM lineup that caters to specific needs. Not everyone needs that fast RAM access but for those who do it could be nice to have an option. The writing is on the wall for years now.

> Not everyone needs that fast RAM access but for those who do it could be nice to have an option. The writing is on the wall for years now.

There is an option already, at least from AMD, in the HEDT segment - Threadripper/Pro has 4/8 channels (although the bandwidth is not a high as Apple chips).

This is exactly what Apple has done, but it does mean soldered memory, as socketed memory at these speeds still hasn't happened. In the server market that is pretty unpopular (even the hyperscalars are apparently reusing DDR4 with CXL in newer machines). DDR6 apparently has twice the memory bandwidth of DDR5 so that will bring it back in line, to around 1TB/s for 12 channels, so comparable but still with standard memory sticks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module)

High Bandwidth Memory uses thousands of interconnects for the data bus. DDR style memory typically uses in the neighborhood of 64 bit transfers at a time.

HBM tends to be integrated onto the package (board, multi chip module, die) because there are really tight signaling and wire routing constraints that make "modularity" impossible.

I remember back in the day you could get motherboards for your 286, 386, and sometimes even 486 with external L1 / L2 / L3 cache -- you'd buy a bunch of static ram dips that you'd populate sockets next to the CPU, and set a bios or DIP switch to enable it. These days that's just not practical because there are too many wires interconnecting the cache to the dies and cache coherence logic, and the speed of light is just too slow and electricity is too messy to put "external" to the die/chip/package, even if the packaging issues could be addressed.

HBM memory is similar -- it's not practical to make a generic interconnect that'd actually work reliably enough to provide field replaceable memory modules as you can with DDR style dimms.

EDIT:

Apparently I'm totally wrong in that these "SOCAMM2" modules have thousands of pads (like a CPU socket) and can in fact run with the same data bus width (1024 bits wide!) as "local" HBM. Very cool. And please ignore my out of date blatherings above. It's still not quite as fast as if you put the HBM in the package, but it's way faster than the DDR style setup.

Apple doesnt use HMB, but its marketing successfully convinced people it does ant thats why ram has to be soldered.

Vera doesn't use soldered memory, it uses SOCAMM2.

Mac ultras would be great if they offered pcie slots to put nvme drives on and ideally an infiniband network card.

They've got thunderbolt 5 which is pretty good and every port has a dedicated controller. You can even network macs together just over thunderbolt.

Not as fast as raw PCIe slots inside the chassis, but I don't think the ghost of steve jobs cares much. He'd tell you that if you've got no taste at all you can put his beautiful machine into ugly junk like from sonnettech and you can go do ugly things elsewhere.

I think apple's happy taking the market they've got and they'll leave the big guns HPC market to nvidia. The margins look great for nvidia right now, but I suspect nvidia's path will be similar to dram's boom/bust cycle more than apple's continuous "premium tool" brand's market positioning.

That 1tb / 12 channels is a continuous streaming read / write rates? I assume big wide DDR memory, for random "IO", is much slower than compared to HBM.

I feel like at a certain point there are just going to be big SOC packages with 128gb of ram and stacks of cores (each with their own "local" cache) and the 128gb "local" HBM on-package ram will just be the 4th or 5th level cache, and big server boards will have 4 of those and CXL elsewhere for "main" memory.

And things like the VAST stuff also blur lines between high speed local storage and less performant san or bulk commodity storage.

The old memory / storage hierarchies are getting mixed up (again).

Interesting times.

New to the field? Intel did xeon max in the last gen, with 64GB HBM 2e, 1.6TB/s per 56 cores. It was not a great success.

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