NVIDIA Vera HPC Performance Benchmarks Take On AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon

While most everyone understandably likes to talk about AI these days, one of the areas of NVIDIA's Vera CPU I have been most eager to test has been for conventional high performance computing (HPC) workloads. HPC was talked up as one of Vera's strengths thanks to its 1.2TB/s LPDDR5x memory bandwidth and custom Olympus cores. Vera is seeing deployments at HPC labs like Los Alamos. With recently having unfettered remote access to a dual NVIDIA Vera server, I ran through a variety of HPC workloads and similar performance benchmarks. Here is a look at how NVIDIA Vera performs against AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon, including with CPU power and frequency metrics. Following the recent NVIDIA Vera SMT performance benchmarks, my next area of curiosity was seeing how well Vera stacks up for HPC workloads. With the two NVIDIA Vera CPUs providing a combined 176 cores and 352 threads, I compared its performance to a few other relevant processors in my lab. This included the AMD EPYC 9575F as a popular choice for HPC workloads with this being a high frequency Turin SKU and between the two sockets having 128 cores / 256 threads. There was also the AMD EPYC 9755 2P tested for that top-end Zen 5 (non-5C/dense) processor for a combined 256 cores and 512 threads. On the Intel side was my lone Xeon 6 Granite Rapids review configuration available of two flagship Xeon 6980P processors for a combined 256 cores and 512 threads. In effect, a top-end look for HPC across NVIDIA Vera, AMD EPYC, and Intel Xeon current-generation processors. Yes, AMD EPYC Zen 6 "Venice" was recently announced and those benchmarks will be coming soon. On the memory side the dual Vera had 16 x 96GB LPDDR5-9600 Samsung M564K6LC3CL0-CCVS7 memory. The AMD EPYC 9575F 2P and EPYC 9755 2P had 24 x 64GB DDR5-6400 Samsung M321R8GA0PB1-CCPKC memory as its top-end configuration. The Intel Xeon 6980P 2P setup was with 24 x 64GB MRDIMM-8800 Micron memory for its top-end configuration. The remote NVIDIA Vera server was running a modified Ubuntu 24.04 LTS stack with a patched Linux 6.17 based kernel build with 64K kernel and GCC 15.3 compiler by default for NVIDIA's recommended Linux software configuration for Vera. With those modifications, the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon servers were on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with their stock environment providing a similar GCC 15 based compiler and other modern defaults for those x86_64 servers. In addition to looking at the raw HPC performance benchmarks, the CPU power consumption was also monitored in real-time on a per-test basis. Additionally, the peak CPU frequency was also monitored