AMD fires back at Nvidia, claiming 256-core Zen 6 ‘Venice’ CPU beats Vera by 3.3x in rack-level performance — company shares first estimated EPYC Venice benchmarks

AMD has shared the first official benchmarks for its forthcoming EPYC ‘Venice’ CPUs, which will be the first chips to use the Zen 6 architecture. The flagship 256-core model hasn’t been detailed in full, but AMD claims it offers 3.3 times the performance of the Nvidia Vera CPU in a rack-scale implementation with a fixed power budget of 100kW.

The constraints of this test completely change the framing of the results, so it’s worth highlighting them first. AMD is looking at performance from the level of a rack, not an individual component on a single socket. AMD’s results are modeled around a 100kW deployment, showing the performance across the rack rather than the performance on a single socket, or even a dual-socket system.

AMD did not, however, actually test all of these deployments. There’s a lot of modeling going on here, which AMD details in its methodology paper that was published alongside the results. First, AMD estimated power based on the processor TDP and additional components, and it used that to calculate the number of nodes (2P system for each node) within a 100kW power budget. Then, it multiplied that number of nodes by single-node performance measured in a handful of benchmarks.

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That’s just the start of the stipulations. AMD doesn’t have its hands on Vera, so the performance here is an estimate. AMD took benchmarks it had for Nvidia’s Grace chip and…