The shift to agentic AI creates a new CPU requirement for the AI factory: fast cores, massive memory bandwidth and the ability to sustain high performance when all cores are active.

Initial benchmark results published by Phoronix today show that the NVIDIA Vera CPU meets this need. For this first public look, the benchmark scope was centered on the agentic workloads Vera was designed for in the modern data center.

The Vera CPU delivers the throughput AI factories need while optimizing platform power. Eighty-eight NVIDIA custom Olympus cores, 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth and a high-speed, on-chip fabric results in a CPU platform that combines core performance and memory bandwidth in an efficient power envelope.

At the heart of Vera are custom NVIDIA Olympus CPU cores. Fully compatible with the Armv9.2 instruction set architecture, Olympus is designed for the sequential CPU work underpinning agentic AI: branch-heavy runtimes, sandboxed code, data processing and orchestration.

Vera’s monolithic die, wide cores, advanced branch prediction and the second-generation NVIDIA Scalable Coherency Fabric help Vera keep data moving across all 88 cores.

Phoronix’s testing of a single-socket Vera CPU — rated at 450-watt thermal design power with less than 30 watts of memory power — showed that it delivers outstanding performance within that power profile, along with generational gains across a broad array of workloads spanning code compilation, file compression, video transcoding, Python, Java and database management.