This Grace CPU Superchip sounds phenomenal! It combines two Grace CPU modules linked by NVLink-C2C technology to deliver 144 Arm v9 cores and 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth. Mind BLOWN!
Taken from Tom’s Hardware … Nvidia unveiled its new 144-core Grace CPU Superchip, its first CPU-only Arm chip designed for the data center, back at GTC. Nvidia shared a benchmark against AMD’s EPYC to claim a 1.5X lead, but that wasn’t very useful because it was against a previous-gen model. However, we found a benchmark of Grace versus Intel’s Ice Lake buried in a GTC presentation from Nvidia’s vice president of its Accelerated Computing business unit, Ian Buck. This benchmark claims Grace is 2X faster and 2.3X more energy-efficient than Intel’s current-gen Ice Lake in a Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model commonly used in HPC.
Nvidia’s first benchmark claimed that Grace is 1.5X faster in the SPECrate_2017 benchmark than two previous-gen 64-core EPYC Rome 7742 processors and that it will deliver twice the power efficiency of today’s server chips when it arrives in early 2023. However, those benchmarks compare to previous-gen chips — the Rome chips will be four years old when Grace arrives next year, and AMD already has its faster EPYC Milan shipping. Given the comparison to Rome, we can expect Nvidia’s Grace to be on-par with the newer Milan in both performance and performance-per-watt. However, even that comparison doesn’t really matter; AMD’s EPYC Genoa will be available in 2023, and it will be faster still.
That makes Nvidia’s comparison against Intel’s current-gen Ice Lake a bit more interesting. So even though Intel will have its Sapphire Rapids available by 2023, at least we’re getting a generation closer in the comparison below. (Beware, this is a vendor-provided benchmark result and is based on a simulation of the Grace CPU, so take Nvidia’s claims with a grain of salt.)
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