Nvidia will only produce one 88-core Vera CPU model — Jensen says the company will make billions of dollars from a single SKU

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One SKU to rule them all?

An Nvidia Vera CPU
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Although Nvidia claims that demand for its Vera processors is beating expectations and that it expects its CPU business to earn billions of dollars, the company does not plan to offer multiple Vera models, it revealed in a briefing at GTC 2026. This approach will reduce Nvidia's costs while enabling it to achieve its strategic goals, but will limit its market penetration.

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Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

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17 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Stomx
    Looks like nobody cares. Let Phoronix to test this processor, or better the whole CPU-only system or CPU-GPU one, instead of just trolling about it with no real numbers
    Reply
  • chaoticjoy1
    Getting real tired of Jensen.
    Reply
  • wussupi83
    88-cores AND focused on single threaded performance Sounds like an oxymoron. A high single threaded performance processor would be valuable to me for some tasks as a consumer. But then again so would an 88-core CPU lol
    Reply
  • S58_is_the_goat
    chaoticjoy1 said:
    Getting real tired of Jensen.
    What about miss jensen?

    https://i.imgur.com/9yBBfOX.jpeg
    Reply
  • bit_user
    The article said:
    To that end, Vera is optimized for maximum single-threaded performance rather than for maximum core count — unlike AMD's EPYC and Intel Xeon processors.
    I remain skeptical that its 1T performance is really that good.

    Again, I think they're spinning a weakness, here, because doing SMT well seems like something that takes multiple generations to refine. For instance Zen 5 cores have a different operational mode for running just one thread, which removes the watermarks that usually restrain a single thread when it has a SMT sibling. Dynamically switching in & out of that mode is going to be complex to implement and verify. Also, even implementing and dialing in the right watermarks for 2T mode is something that takes time and lots of workload testing.

    AMD and Intel both have frequency-optimized variants of their server CPUs, which sacrifice some core count for greater frequencies. I'm skeptical their 1T/core perf isn't at least as good as Vera's, at comparable core counts.

    I think Nvidia's decision not to go for higher core counts might've been driven by fabric scalability issues & latency tradeoffs, or maybe they just felt that more cores weren't needed for the CPU portion of the workloads they were targeting, at the time they made these design decisions.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    S58_is_the_goat said:
    What about miss jensen?

    https://i.imgur.com/9yBBfOX.jpeg

    She has certainly aged better than Mr. Jensen
    Reply
  • wussupi83
    bit_user said:
    I remain skeptical that its 1T performance is really that good.

    Again, I think they're spinning a weakness, here, because doing SMT well seems like something that takes multiple generations to refine. For instance Zen 5 cores have a different operational mode for running just one thread, which removes the watermarks that usually restrain a single thread when it has a SMT sibling. Dynamically switching in & out of that mode is going to be complex to implement and verify. Also, even implementing and dialing in the right watermarks for 2T mode is something that takes time and lots of workload testing.

    AMD and Intel both have frequency-optimized variants of their server CPUs, which sacrifice some core count for greater frequencies. I'm skeptical their 1T/core perf isn't at least as good as Vera's, at comparable core counts.

    I think Nvidia's decision not to go for higher core counts might've been driven by fabric scalability issues & latency tradeoffs, or maybe they just felt that more cores weren't needed for the CPU portion of the workloads they were targeting, at the time they made these design decisions.
    A spin is certainly possible. Maybe they didn't plan for the single threaded performance to be the standout feature. And now they have to go with it But it will still have value if it's really that much better than current competitors.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    wussupi83 said:
    A spin is certainly possible. Maybe they didn't plan for the single threaded performance to be the standout feature. And now they have to go with it But it will still have value if it's really that much better than current competitors.
    No doubt, this CPU/core sounds like a monster! I can't wait to see some detailed, independent benchmarks & analysis.

    It's too bad that Nvidia is usually not public about its CPU cores. I think they never presented Denver or Carmel at Hot Chips.
    Reply
  • Air2004
    "A quick look at the die shot of the processor reveals that it packs 91 cores, which enables Intel to keep three of them for redundancy and get decent yields with an 88-core part."


    How does that work ? Does not compute.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Air2004 said:
    "A quick look at the die shot of the processor reveals that it packs 91 cores, which enables Intel to keep three of them for redundancy and get decent yields with an 88-core part."


    How does that work ? Does not compute.
    You mean the part about how the article referenced Intel? Yeah, I caught that too. I'm sure it was just a Freudian slip.
    ; )
    Reply