NVIDIA GH200 Grace-Hopper Superchip With 72 Core ARM CPU Tested, Comes Close To AMD EPYC Genoa & Intel Emerald Rapids

09.02.2024 - 16:21 / wccftech.com / Sapphire Rapids / Hassan Mujtaba

NVIDIA's GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip has been tested with its 72 Core ARM CPU performing close to AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon counterparts.

NVIDIA's Grace CPU With 72 ARM Neoverse V2 Cores Competes Well Against Intel Xeon & AMD EPYC Counterparts In First Tests of GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip

The NVIDIA Grace CPU is the alternative to the traditional x86 CPUs in the server segment. It utilizes the Arm architecture and features up to 144 Neoverse V2 cores. The Grace CPU comes in two packages, one as the Grace Hopper Superchip with the H200 GPU and a single Grace chip with 72 cores with HBM memory while the second model is the Grace Superchip which features two Grace CPUs, each with 72 cores for a total of 144 cores with LPDDR5x memory. With this chip, NVIDIA is expecting to end its dependency on the x86 CPU market which includes the likes of AMD and Intel to offer its customers its in-house solution.

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Some of the main highlights of Grace include:

• High-performance CPU for HPC and cloud computing
• Super chip design with up to 144 Arm v9 CPU cores
• World’s first LPDDR5x with ECC Memory, 1TB/s total bandwidth
• SPECrate2017_int_base over 740 (estimated)
• 900 GB/s coherent interface, 7X faster than PCIe Gen 5
• 2X the packaging density of DIMM-based solutions
• 2X the performance per watt of today’s leading CPU
• Runs all NVIDIA software stacks and platforms, including RTX, HPC, AI, and Omniverse

In official benchmarks, NVIDIA touted that the Grace CPU would offer up to 2x performance versus Intel Sapphire Rapids and AMD Genoa CPUs at the same power and also showcased up to 3.5x the efficiency over AMD's last-gen EPYC Milan CPUs. Now, Phoronix has conducted its benchmarks across its wide suite of HPC benchmarks based on Linux. You can check out the full review here.

Getting straight to the performance roundup, it looks like the NVIDIA Grace CPU is almost on par with Intel's top Emerald Rapids Xeon CPU with 60 cores and AMD 64-core EPYC Genoa chips. That should be expected since the Grace CPU offers a higher core count of 72 cores but since this is a new chip, we can expect performance to further improve as the Arm architecture is optimized by NVIDIA for HPC and Server applications.

The most important testing which is the power and efficiency of the chip was left out since the tech outlet reports that there isn't any power monitoring support available for the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip yet but that will be added once the support arrives. The Grace Superchip with two Grace CPUs and 144 cores is rated at up to 500W for the complete package so we can guesstimate a 200-250W power for each CPU which is much lower than the 320-350W