How NVIDIA Vera CPU Performance Compares To The Ampere Altra Max
Last month on Phoronix was an exclusive first look at the NVIDIA Vera CPU performance compared to prior-generation NVIDIA Grace as well as the current AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon competition. Following that was looking at how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved over the past eight years of AArch64 Linux servers. A Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested wanting to see how Vera compares to Ampere Altra. While Ampere Altra has been in the marketplace now for more than five years, they are some of the most readily available ARM Linux server options for DIY/enthusiast builds given the scarcity of AmpereOne and lack of other readily available socketed ARM CPU options. This article shows how the performance compares between Ampere Altra Max and NVIDIA Vera.
Using the original Vera data collected last month at NVIDIA, today are benchmarks showing how it compares to Ampere Altra when setup in a similar Ubuntu Linux software configuration. It would have been interesting to also show how the newer AmpereOne (M) CPUs compare but unfortunately I don't have any hardware in my lab for these newer Ampere platforms and they also still aren't as readily available as Ampere Altra. Even these years later, Ampere Altra motherboards and processors still can be found at NewEgg and other Internet retailers as well as pre-built Ampere Altra servers.
The top-end Ampere Altra Max was tested, the M128-30 with 128 Arm Neoverse-N1 cores and a 3.0GHz clock frequency along with eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory. The Ampere Altra M138-30 has a usage power of 183 Watts for the CPU socket, but as previously noted no Vera power data to share from the actual testing besides its roughly 450 Watt rating and also only sipping around 50 Watts on top of that with the LPDDR5X memory. As a reminder, with NVIDIA Vera you have 88 cores / 176 threads built on their in-house Olympus core design.
The Ampere Altra Max M128-30 system used for testing was the System76 Thelio Astra that continues to be sold by the popular Denver-based Linux PC vendor. The System76 Thelio Altra with Ampere Altra Max M138-30 was equipped with 8 x 32GB DDR4-3200 Micron memory and a 1TB Kingston NVMe SSD while running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
So while going into this it should be obvious NVIDIA Vera is faster with its modern core design and LPDDR5X memory and years of additional innovations over the Ampere Altra that first debuted in 2020, for those curious given the commonality of Ampere Altra in the marketplace and for ARM Linux server enthusiasts/DIYers, hopefully you find this data useful for quantifying the difference.