Nvidia's Grace server CPU trades blows with AMD and Intel in detailed review -- outperforms Bergamo, Genoa, and Emerald Rapids in over half of the benchmarks
Nvidia's Grace server CPU appears to be very competitive, according to Phoronix's review of the GH100, which includes a single Grace chip. Although Nvidia's 72-core Arm CPU lagged behind AMD's and Intel's flagships in overall performance, it won in more benchmarks than the top-end Epyc 9754 or Xeon Platinum 8592+. With more optimization for the Arm architecture, Grace could prove to be a very potent datacenter processor.
GH100 includes a Hopper GPU and a 72-core Grace CPU with 480GB of LPDDR5X RAM. Since Nvidia doesn't sell single Grace chips on their own, GH100 (and GH200) are really the only devices that can be tested to ascertain the performance of just one Grace CPU. Phoronix obtained access to a GH100 via GPTshop.ai, but only remotely. No power statistics were exposed to the remote computer, and since the publication couldn't see power draw from the wall, no power figures are quoted in the review.
The benchmarks were conducted in Linux, the most common server operating system. The review includes comparisons to many different CPUs, including dual-socket setups. In the table below, we've taken the results comparing Grace to AMD's flagship Bergamo-based Epyc 9754 and Intel's top-end Emerald Rapids Xeon Platinum 8592+
