Arm's Cortex X925 has achieved a major milestone by reaching performance parity with AMD's Zen 5 and Intel's Lion Cove in high-end desktop implementations. The core powers Nvidia's GB10 chip used in Dell's Pro Max series, featuring ten X925 cores split across two clusters with one core reaching 4 GHz. This marks Arm's successful entry into the high-performance desktop market.

Unlike Arm's traditional focus on low power and area efficiency, the X925 is a massive 10-wide core designed through and through to maximize performance. It features more reordering capacity than AMD's Zen 5 and L2 cache comparable to Intel's recent P-Cores. The core makes few concessions to reduce power and area, representing a significant departure from Arm's 7-series architecture philosophy.

The X925 includes impressive branch prediction capabilities that match or slightly exceed Zen 5's performance across SPEC CPU2017 benchmarks. It features a large first-level BTB capable of handling two taken branches per cycle and can track up to 16,384 branches through slower BTB levels. The core also boasts a 29-entry return stack and can sustain 10 instructions per cycle, though it shows some limitations with 4 KB pages compared to 2 MB pages.