Nvidia's Vera Whitepaper Has a Thread Loose
Nvidia's Vera whitepaper showcases a powerful 88-core Arm CPU with cutting-edge features like value prediction and a graph prefetcher, but its attempt to frame x86 as inferior is riddled with misleading diagrams and questionable benchmarks. The paper misrepresents traditional SMT as time-slicing, presents an optional 32-node NUMA configuration as standard, and labels four SPEC components as 'agentic benchmarks.' Despite these flaws, early independent testing suggests Vera is genuinely formidable, making the whitepaper's spin unnecessary.
The frustrating part is that Vera does not need this help, with early independent testing suggesting Olympus is genuinely formidable.
- titzer
Ohhh look, value prediction. Exactly the kind of thing that led to Spectre. There will be a cottage industry of information leaks and mitigations for a decade.
- KeplerBoy
AMDs marketing is just as sketchy. Their new Zen6 server page claims 3.3x performance per watt over vera on "agentic workloads" for a 100 kW rack. Maybe they are comparing a CPU heavy rack to an nvidia vera rack with 50 kW of GPUs sitting idle, who knows?
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/9006-...
- twoodfin
I don’t think picking a handful of SPEC benchmarks that approximate today’s most common agentic workloads (compiling code, interpreting Python) and then calling them “agentic benchmarks” is misleading at all.
That you need a whole lot of “ordinary” compute to benefit from the scaling properties of agents is the reason Nvidia is making this chip in the first place.
- transcriptase
Let’s not forget the fact that despite their new market cap and being the beneficiary of having a near monopoly on making incredibly complex pickaxes during a gold rush… Nvidia is still the company with a long and consistent history of misleading their customers via marketing. Their greatest hits include:
- The digital equivalent of the VW emissions scandal where drivers detected when they were being benchmarked and altering rendering for better results
- Selling GPUs as having 4gb vram when it was only 3.5gb usable, the remaining 0.5 being absurdly slower and causing performance loss when used
- Using intentionally misleading naming schemes to obfuscate things like memory bus width being drastically different between what superficially appeared to be similarly spec’d cards
A dozen other less egregious but similarly disingenuous decisions
But to be clear, I’m a huge fan and continue to run Nvidia because their products are generally incredible regardless
- amluto
In today’s “agentic” world, everyone seems to have forgotten approximately everything we used to know about security. And this new CPU is going all in on value speculation. Delightful.
Maybe if “cyber” models get good enough at exploiting speculation attacks, people will start demanding equipment that is less prone to these attacks.