During its recent GTC 2022(opens in new tab) disclosures, NVIDIA took the wraps off of its Grace CPU, which packs 144 Arm cores into a platform that Nvidia believes is powerful enough to upend the traditional server market.
During its initial presentations, Nvidia stated that the Grace CPU could deliver 50% more performance in a SPEC benchmark than two 64-core AMD EPYC processors at half of the power consumption. Although the provided result was just one likely highly optimised benchmark, it showed that Nvidia is not messing about, and it adds a lot of context to Nvidia's attempts to buy Arm outright. Since that attempt failed(opens in new tab), it's left the door open for others to attempt to buy Arm(opens in new tab).
Nvidia claims the Grace CPU is set to become the fastest server processor on the market when it ships in early 2023. Big and bold claims! But given Nvidia's bullish momentum, who are we to argue. At least not until the ships are independently tested in a wide variety of benchmarks.
Since GTC, Tom's Hardware did some digging(opens in new tab) and found another result, which simulates the performance of the Grace CPU versus Intel's Ice Lake Xeon platform. If the result turns out to be accurate, even mostly accurate, then Intel and AMD are set to face some mega competition.
Best CPU for gaming(opens in new tab): The top chips from Intel and AMDBest gaming motherboard(opens in new tab): The right boardsBest graphics card(opens in new tab): Your perfect pixel-pusher awaitsBest SSD for gaming(opens in new tab): Get into the game ahead of the rest
Tom's uncovered a benchmark comparing Grace to Intel's Ice Lake during part of a presentation by Nvidia's vice president of its Accelerated Computing business unit,
Read more on pcgamer.com