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