Nvidia Grace: Superchip to be twice as fast as Intel Xeon

At the end of March, Nvidia presented Nividia Grace, a powerful CPU for supercomputers, at the GPU Technology Conference (we reported). In the presentation for the GTC-2022, the company now compared the new superchip with 144 cores to the Intel Xeon of the Ice Lake generation.

Nvidia Grace: Twice as fast and 2.3 times as efficient as Intel Xeon

At a keynote, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang showcased the performance of the new Nvidia Grace CPU superchip with the current Intel Xeon processor (Ice Lake SP) based on a presentation by Nvidia’s vice president for hyperscale and HPC, Ian Buck, which colleagues at Tom’s Hardware came across. It is available in PDF format.

The basis of the comparison was typically the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) weather simulation for the Iberian Peninsula. The WRF is considered to be particularly memory-heavy and is therefore repeatedly used as a test scenario in the HPC segment.

The result is impressive. Nvidia’s Grace superchip is said to have achieved double the performance compared to two Intel Xeon Platinum 8360Y CPUs and 2.3 times the energy efficiency, as the manufacturer announces.

Nvidia Grace vs Intel Xeon

The Nvidia Grace superchip brings it to 144 ARM cores along with almost 1 TByte/s LPDDR5X memory. In comparison, the Vebrund with two Intel Xeon Platinum 8360Y CPUs has 72 cores and 144 threads.

The power consumption of 500 watts is also shared between Nvidia Grace and the combination of two Intel Xeon CPUs, which makes a comparison possible. However, the compared Intel chips based on the Ice Lake generation are almost old hat and should get a successor soon.

Intel Xeon: Sapphire Rapids models in late summer 2022

The successor to the Intel Xeon chips based on Sapphire Rapids should be launched as early as late summer 2022, probably in the 3rd quarter of 2022. Here, the manufacturer is relying for the first time on a chiplet design with probably 56 real cores and an improved architecture. However, Nvidia wants to launch the Grace superchip even earlier, which is expected to be available in the first half of 2022.