Not content with utter GPU domination, Nvidia's new Vera chip is coming for CPUs though maybe not gaming CPUs just yet
Nvidia utterly dominates the market for GPUs, be that AI chips or gaming graphics cards. But this, apparently, is not enough. Now, Nvidia is gunning for the CPU market, too.
Nvidia previously announced a new Arm processor called Vera and based on custom-designed CPU cores. Now the company has announced an initial customer for the chip and emphasised that it is the first time it has supplied a CPU as a separate product.
Bloomberg reports on a new deal between Nvidia and cloud services outfit CoreWeave that forms the basis of what is effectively the launch of the Vera CPU. In what has become a typically circular form for the AI industry of late, Nvidia is investing $2 billion in Coreweave, while the latter will buy up to $6 billion in Nvidia hardware, including those Vera chips.
Bloomberg says the Vera CPU will be competing with server chips from Intel and AMD, along with other cloud computing processors such as Amazon's Graviton. But not all that much is known about Nvidia's Vera CPU.
Nvidia has previously said that it runs a new custom-designed Arm core called Olympus. Beyond that, data points are limited to the fact that Vera has 88 cores, is rated at 50 W and offers double the performance of Nvidia's previous Arm CPU, known as Grace.
So, inferences can be drawn from that. Grace has 72 cores, so Vera is getting double the performance with a relatively small increase in core count from 72 to 88. 50 W is also a remarkably low power rating for an 88-core CPU.
For the record, Grace uses CPU core architecture licensed directly from Arm, the Neoverse V2 CPU core design. In other words, Nvidia did not design the cores in the Grace CPU.
Of course, for us the big question which remains unanswered is whether the new Vera CPU and its Nvidia-designed cores are destined to break free from data centers and appear in PCs.
In the short term, the answer to that seems to be a firm "no". Nvidia does have plans to release an Arm CPU for PCs, codenamed N1X. But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said it will be based on the GB10 "Superchip" in the DGX Spark mini AI computer. And while that, too, has Arm cores, it doesn't use the Vera CPU or Olympus cores.
Instead, it also has off-the-shelf Arm-designed cores, though in this case Arm Cortex-X925 and Cortex-A725 cores. If you wanted to be really speculative, you might wonder whether the rumoured follow-up to N1X, the Nvidia N2 CPU, might make the move to custom Arm cores and therefore the Olympus or something closely related to it.
Along with all this talk of Nvidia Arm CPUs, there are broader questions over the future of Arm on the PC. The software side, particularly when it comes to game support, means that it's not just as simple as Nvidia releasing an uber powerful Arm CPU for the PC and then sitting back as the dominance bit takes care of itself.
So, even if Nvidia does release something really incredible in hardware terms, there will still be a lot of work to be done. But if anyone can afford to take on this kind of challenge. It's surely Nvidia.