NVIDIA GRACE ARM NVIDIA superchip on Arm architecture
- Apr 12
During the event, neither the General Director of NVIDIA nor the web resources shared the details of the performance statements, but NVIDIA shared the new slide, which shows the performance of the chip compared to the Intel Ice Lake Xeon platform.
Thus, a new performance slide of the processor "superchip" NVIDIA Grace ARM has been published, which shows the "projected" performance of the WRF (weather research and forecasting) using the standard NCAR WRF (v3.9.1.1 transferred to ARM). The IB4 model is a 4-kilometer regional forecast for the Pyrenean Peninsula, which is located in Southern Europe and covers Spain and Portugal.
Keep in mind that this productivity measurement refers to the "superchip" Grace CPU, and not Grace Hopper Superchip. NVIDIA Grace processor "Superchip" uses NVLink-C2C technology to provide 144 ARM V9 cores and memory bandwidth 1 TB / s.
Performance was measured in comparison with the Intel Xeon 8360Y Ice Lake processor, working in configuration with two sockets. The entire platform worked for 572 W in configuration with 1 node. Since each XEON CPU has 36 cores, the configuration with two sockets will give 72 kernels and 144 streams. This is lower than that of the "superchip" NVIDIA Grace, but may be several reasons why Nvidia used it for comparison, and one of them was the cost.
As for performance indicators, Superchip NVIDIA Grace CPU offers 2-fold bandwidth and 2,3-fold efficiency compared to the Intel Ice Lake platform. One of the reasons for a significant performance increase is that the WRF model depends on the memory bandwidth, and the huge bandwidth indicators supported by the "superchip" NVIDIA Grace really help it in this specific HPC workload.
During the presentation, the GTC 2022 NVIDIA compared the Superchip with the offers of AMD EPYC, presented in its DGX solutions. It was quickly found that the difference in performance between Grace and EpYC is not so high, as can be seen from the results of the SPEC CPU 2017 Integer Rate. But this may change, since all these are relative forecasts, and the processor release is not scheduled until the first half of 2023. It will be definitely interesting to see how Grace processors will look compared to X86 chips, but by the time they are released they will compete with AMD Genoa and Intel Sapphire Rapids processors.