NVIDIA Grace CPU Offers Up To 2X Performance Versus AMD Genoa & Intel Sapphire Rapids x86 Chips At Same Power

NVIDIA has unveiled new benchmarks of its upcoming Arm-based Grace GPU which will power next generation data centers and servers.

Powered by the Arm Neoverse N2 cores, the Grace CPU will be utilized in NVIDIA's Superchips that come in both CPU+CPU and CPU+GPU flavors. NVIDIA recently announced its most powerful GPU for AI and Compute workloads known as GH200 which also comes with the world's fastest HBM3e memory and that will be adopted by the Grace Hopper Superchip.

Some of the main highlights of Grace include:

For the Hot Chips 2023 presentation, NVIDIA's Chief Scientist, Bill Dally, presented the performance comparisons between an NVIDIA Grace Superchip and a competing dual-socket x86 solution from its competitors. These include AMD's EPYC 9654 which is the fastest 96 cores & 192 thread solution & also Intel's flagship, the Xeon Platinum 8480+ which features 56 cores and 112 threads. Since the solutions were running on a dual-socket configuration, that's a total of 192 cores for AMD and 112 cores for Intel's platform.

We know from the official NVIDIA Grace CPU specs that the Grace Superchip offers a total of 144 (72 Arm Neoverse V2 per chip) cores, supports up to 960 GB of LPDDR5X memory with up to 1 TB/s of raw bandwidth, and has a combined power draw of 500W. Additional specs include 117 MB of L3 cache, and 58 Gen5 lanes, all while using the TSMC 4N process node.

The benchmarks selected by NVIDIA cover a wide spectrum of server applications such as Weather WRF, MD CP2K, Climate NEMO, CFD OpenFOAM, & Graph Analytics GapBS BFS. In all benchmarks, NVIDIA's Grace Superchip CPUs offer up to 40% better performance than AMD's Genoa CPUs while sitting much ahead of Intel's Sapphire Rapids CPUs. The majority of benchmarks were on par with Genoa and even that is great for Grace since two of those chips have a combined TDP of 640W (320 Watts per EPYC 9654) whereas the Grace Superchip runs at 500W.

However, the performance comparisons get even more interesting when compared to an actual large-scale data center application. A 5 MW Data Center throughput benchmark shows that NVIDIA's Grace Superchips can offer up to 2.5x the performance while being vastly efficient within the same benchmarks. For data center and server clients that are invested in these workloads, Grace CPUs can be a major game changer just as NVIDIA's Tensor Core GPUs have dominated the HPC and AI space.