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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"We only are going to build one Vera CPU [SKU]," said Ian Buck, Nvidia's VP and general manager of hyperscale and HPC business at Nvidia, at a news conference attended by Tom's Hardware at GTC. "The world is not going to be served by one SKU of CPU, and that is not our intention. We like a workload problem to go solve, to go swarm, and Nvidia is making one CPU to help in that agentic workload."

Nvidia has always positioned its processors to work with its own compute GPUs for AI and HPC, rather than to serve the broader market of CPU workloads. 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.

"We created a brand-new CPU that is designed for extremely high single-threaded performance, incredibly high data output, incredibly good at data processing, and extreme energy efficiency, […] we built that so it could go along with these racks for agentic AI processing," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at GTC. "[Vera CPUs are] twice the performance-per-watt than any CPUs in the world. […] I am very pleased with our architects, we have designed a revolutionary CPU."

Limiting the number of Vera stock keeping units (SKUs) to one makes sense for Nvidia. 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. While this means that everything that has less than 88 fully functional cores will be scrapped, this makes sense as Nvidia will not have to spend money on binning. At the end of the day, the company's goal is to use Vera processors for its NVL72 VR200 and VR300 rack-scale systems rather than to build a fully-fledged CPU business.

Still, there is significant market interest in Nvidia's Vera processor, so the company will sell them separately as well. According to Jensen, the company expects CPUs to become a billion-dollar business. However, there are no plans to make it bigger or compete against AMD and Intel — for now, at least.

"We never thought we will be selling CPUs standalone, but we are selling a lot of CPUs standalone," Huang said. "This will for sure be a multi-billion dollar business for us."