NVIDIA has unveiled Vera, its first server CPU featuring the Olympus core. The 45-page whitepaper details Vera's 88-core monolithic design, boasting a 10-wide Arm v9.2 core with advanced features like value prediction and a graph prefetcher. It includes 2 MB of private L2 cache per core and a substantial 164 MB of shared last-level cache, supported by eight LPDDR5X memory interfaces promising 1.2 TB/s bandwidth.

However, the whitepaper is criticized for misrepresenting traditional x86 designs and exaggerating Vera's advantages. While Olympus appears formidable, with early independent testing showing it outperforming existing Arm and x86 servers, the paper's narrative is deemed weak. Features like value prediction and graph prefetching, while well-implemented, are not entirely novel, with similar concepts appearing in Intel and AMD architectures.

The paper's depiction of Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) in x86 is also challenged, with claims that Vera's approach offers superior determinism and isolation. Despite these criticisms of the whitepaper's presentation, early benchmarks from Phoronix suggest Vera is a highly performant server CPU, with its geomean performance exceeding that of a 5 GHz EPYC 9575 F.