A closer look at Verano, AMD's first step toward a Zen-based superchip to rival Nvidia's Vera Rubin
In an interview with The Register during a press event in Las Vegas last week, Madhu Rangarajan, CVP of AMD's compute and enterprise AI products business, described Verano as being the first step towards building something that more closely resembles Nvidia's Vera Rubin superchips.
Key points
- Unlike with a lot of notebooks, the memory itself won't be soldered down and will use the same SOCAMM2 modules found in Nvidia's Vera-Rubin and Vera-Vera CPU Superchips.
- Each of Nvidia's superchips joins a single 88-core Vera CPU and 1.5 TB of LPDDR5X memory to a pair of Rubin GPUs via Nvidia's speedy NVLink-C2C interconnect.
- Rangarajan tells us Verano will be the host CPU for a similar class of product using AMD GPUs, and much like Nvidia's superchips, the CPU will also use notebook memory rather than conventional RDIMMS.
In a head note, I'd say the Verano+GPU solution is a competitor to Vera+Rubin." For reference, Vera Rubin and the GB200 and GB300 that came before it aren't your typical server platforms.
Additional details
- Nvidia's superchip dispensed with this, replacing PCIe with its NVLink-C2C interconnect, which provides 900 GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth to each of the system's GPUs.
- However, unlike Vera, which is also being deployed as a standalone CPU in storage servers and agent sandboxes, Verano has a singular purpose: keeping its GPUs fed.
- It features either six of AMD's core complex dies (CCDs) for a total of 72 high-frequency cores clocking to 5.3 GHz, or 192 density-optimized cores clocking to 4.1 GHz, depending on whether the customer's workloads prefer core density or faster clocks.
- Rather than general-purpose workloads, Verano is designed specifically to power AMD's next generation of GPU servers.
- AMD's upcoming Verano processors aren't like any Epyc CPUs we've seen before.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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