Nvidia unveils Vera CPU with custom Olympus cores to challenge Intel and AMD

Nvidia introduced the Vera processor, featuring 88 custom Arm-compatible Olympus cores and a monolithic compute die, targeting AI head-node and agentic workloads.

Nvidia’s Vera CPU marks the company’s first fully custom processor, built around the newly designed Olympus core that follows the Armv9.2 ISA. The chip houses 88 cores on a single 3 nm monolithic die, supported by separate chiplets for LPDDR5X memory, PCIe 6.4/CXL 3.1 I/O and NVLink interconnect. In a dual-socket configuration called the Vera CPU Superchip, two dies are linked via NVLink-C2C, offering 1.8 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth and a total of 176 cores.

Nvidia’s whitepaper highlights a neural branch predictor, spatial multithreading that splits a core into two skinny units, and a second-generation scalable coherency fabric delivering 3.4 TB/s of core-to-core bandwidth. The processor targets AI head-node management and agentic AI workloads, with cloud providers including Alibaba, ByteDance, Meta, Oracle, CoreWeave, Lambda, Nebius and NScale already committing to its use. While Nvidia claims significant per-core performance gains over competing AMD and Intel CPUs, independent benchmarks are still pending.