Nevertheless, when browsing the results, there are several things that must be kept in mind:
1. Much of the advantage of the NVIDIA Vera CPU is caused not by having better CPU cores, but by having a much faster memory interface than the CPUs to which it has been compared.
2. These benchmarks have been specifically approved by NVIDIA, as being workloads where Vera is competitive. It was forbidden to publish other benchmarks. There are plenty of other benchmarks, especially for scientific/technical computing, where Vera would not be competitive with x86 CPUs.
3. Nowadays, AMD Zen 5 still beats Vera in most benchmarks of interest, but it is already an ancient CPU core. Over its lifetime, NVIDIA Vera will compete with AMD Zen 6, which will be launched in a few months from now and which is expected to be much faster than Zen 5, including by having a faster and wider memory interface. Also with Intel, while Granite Rapids looks rather pathetic nowadays, the future Diamond Rapids should be greatly improved and it will be the competitor overlapping with Vera in its lifetime.
I feel like at a certain point there are just going to be big SOC packages with 128gb of ram and stacks of cores (each with their own "local" cache) and the 128gb "local" HBM on-package ram will just be the 4th or 5th level cache, and big server boards will have 4 of those and CXL elsewhere for "main" memory.
And things like the VAST stuff also blur lines between high speed local storage and less performant san or bulk commodity storage.
The old memory / storage hierarchies are getting mixed up (again).
Interesting times.
The thing is, it doesn't have to do anything. It is busy getting bailed out, I guess.
Also, does that mean that once the AI bubble pops, Nvidia come come to the consumer market with a powerful ARM gaming SoC?
There is an option already, at least from AMD, in the HEDT segment - Threadripper/Pro has 4/8 channels (although the bandwidth is not a high as Apple chips).