At the rack level, Arm’s modeled performance averages 1.99x AMD’s, with a lead in all seven workloads. The model uses rated server-power estimates of 950 W for the 128-core Arm configuration, 1,050 W for the 136-core version, and 1,700 W for AMD, including memory and other system components. After reserving about 8% of a 24 kW rack budget for networking and power distribution, this leaves room for 23 or 21 Arm servers versus 13 AMD servers.
For SWE-bench, the 2.00x per rack result was obtained by multiplying the roughly 1.13x chip result by 23/13. The larger gain comes from fitting more servers into the same power budget. Furthermore, these projections use modeled whole-server power, not throughput measurements from two fully populated racks.
Arm’s model also gives the AMD servers about twice as much RAM: roughly 2 TB against 1 TB for Arm. It allocates 4 GB per hardware thread, with each AMD core supporting two threads while each Arm core supports one. This puts the memory-power allowance at 336 W for AMD and 192 W for Arm. Signal65 also calculated what happens when memory is allocated per physical core. In this setup, AMD’s memory and power allowance falls, and Arm’s average modeled rack advantage drops from 1.99x to approximately 1.81x. The usefulness of the 2 TB AMD configuration depends on how much memory the workloads actually need, as SMT does not inherently require twice the memory.
To verify the findings, Signal65 remotely observed Arm’s test runs and examined the original logs, result files, scripts, and configuration records. A separate review team rebuilt the calculations with its own code and reproduced all seven results within 0.5%. However, Signal65 did not run a separate hardware rerun in its own lab. In addition, Signal65 could independently confirm BIOS and memory settings for only the EPYC 9965 system. These settings were unavailable for independent verification on the Arm and EPYC 9755 systems. Along with the software differences, these gaps slightly affect the certainty with which the results can be attributed to the processors themselves.
While Arm believes its methodology should be the standard, it does not hold a monopoly on how the industry evaluates agentic CPU performance. For example, AMD promotes agents per watt, dollar, and rack. Footnotes on its EPYC 9006 page identify available CPU threads as a proxy for agent capacity, with actual throughput depending on the workload and system. Its separate workload analysis models a 100 kW rack and claims 2.37× performance for EPYC 9965 over Nvidia's Vera , using a geometric mean across six infrastructure workloads.
Nvidia, on the other hand, emphasizes Vera’s single-thread performance and memory bandwidth, and says a 256-CPU rack supports more than 22,500 concurrent CPU environments. These numbers describe different things and do not directly imply any specific advantage. Methodologies vary across manufacturers by workload, power assumptions, and aggregation methods, making direct CPU comparisons complex. The current comparison is against AMD's fifth-generation “Turin” processor with 128 cores. The company launched its latest sixth-generation EPYC 9006 “Venice” family this year , dedicated to agentic AI.
Etiido Uko Social Links Navigation News Contributor Etiido Uko is a news contributor for Tom's Hardware covering the latest updates in big tech and the PC industry. He is a mechanical engineer and senior technical writer with over nine years of experience in documentation and reporting. He is deeply passionate about all things engineering and technology, and is an expert in gadgets, manufacturing, robotics, automotive, and aerospace.
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/arm-claims-agi-cpu-delivers-double-the-performance-per-rack-of-amd-epyc-9755-in-independent-analysis-new-cpu-evaluation-methodology-developed-by-arm-evaluates-agentic-ai-performance-across-seven-workloads#main
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