Nvidia’s focus on agentic AI makes sense given the times we’re living in, but it can miss the forest for the trees. Oracle bringing Vera standalone instances online shifts the focus onto the broader implications of Vera’s entrance into the data center. There are some aspects of performance that characterize agentic AI workloads, but many agent workloads are regular data center workloads in the first place, just under high concurrency.
For instance, SQLite performance is important for any server querying a large database, regardless of its written by logic, a person, or an AI agent. Nvidia’s second-gen Scalable Coherency Fabric (SCF), which we saw at play in Stream, shows up in a real workload here, with these database queries largely bound by data movement across the system.
And that is what makes Vera so interesting in the context of Oracle’s announcement. It’s a CPU built for agentic AI, says Nvidia, but the crosstalk with general data center workloads is strong. It’s not just a CPU to use because you need access to Nvidia’s accelerators. Depending on the workload, it may even be a better choice than the x86 guard.
Ultimately, we have to see how customers of these hyperscalers use (or don’t use) Vera in production. It’s demonstrated its usefulness in agentic AI loops, but it’s also showing early promise in certain general-purpose workloads. Oracle’s standalone deployment is a sign that there’s some demand for Vera that isn't exclusively tied at the hip of a Rubin GPU.
Oracle is approaching cautiously, however, as any hyperscaler should be when bringing up a multi-gigawatt deployment. The company said it will also offer Nvidia’s HGX NVL8, bringing eight Rubin GPUs together in a cluster, connected to a dual, 64-core Intel Xeon 6 host with 4TB of DDR5 memory.
Our testing of Vera shared in this article is part of a larger benchmarking session we had with the chip, and we'll share the technical details of the test setup in our forthcoming review. We’ll be publishing our full results shortly on Tom’s Hardware.
Jake Roach Social Links Navigation Senior Analyst, CPUs Jake Roach is the Senior CPU Analyst at Tom’s Hardware, writing reviews, news, and features about the latest consumer and workstation processors.
Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/nvidia-and-oracle-bring-vera-cpu-instances-online-in-multi-gigawatt-deployment-oci-superclusters-also-set-to-expand-with-rubin-only-clusters-attached-to-dual-xeon-6-hosts#main
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