Yesterday at GTC, Nvidia announced a bunch of things but one little bit about Vera seems to have escaped attention. SemiAccurate would like to thank an anonymous reader who initially tipped us off to this feature.
If you look at the slide for Vera from the ServeTheHome livestream, the high level stats for Vera and Vera Rubin are pretty clear. It is the standard ARM CPU die with a big Nvidia GPU die. Vera is a single die but Rubin can either be two or four dies depending on the flavor, normal or Ultra. So far so expected.
Nvidia Vera Rubin from Serve the Home (Used with permission)
The specs for Rubin are pretty standard, 2 or 4 big GPU dies with four HBM4 or HBM4e stacks per die. That puts the stack capacity at 36GB per HBM4 on vanilla or 62.5 for Ultra. Given that neither number is a ‘nice’ one for powers of two, it looks like Nvidia is rounding on Ultra and using a very non-standard HBM4 stack for vanilla. But memory isn’t the issue, once again it is pretty par for the course.
What is interesting is the specs for Vera. The core count is 88 and if you count the probable die candidates in the picture, there are 7 columns and 6.5 rows, 2 cores per row, for a total of 91 potential cores. Throw in a bit of yield salvage redundancy and that 88 number seems like a very achievable number. The interesting bit however is the thread count, note that it says 176 threads so Vera is going to be multi-threaded, a first for Nvidia.
Then go back to the 88 custom cores line. Licensed ARM cores are single threaded for the consumer line but can be multi-threaded on the server lines. This brings up the real question, is this a ground up Nvidia core or a lightly modified ARM core? For the time being we can’t tell for sure but given Nvidia’s history of honesty and not overclaiming credit in messaging, we are going to lean, lightly, toward it being a modified ARM design. Keep an eye on this as more is revealed.S|A
Update March 19, 2025@3:30pm: Got an answer.
Note: The following is for professional and student level subscribers.
Disclosures: Charlie Demerjian and Stone Arch Networking Services, Inc. have no consulting relationships, investment relationships, or hold any investment positions with any of the companies mentioned in this report.
