A 39-test comparison between Nvidia's Grace server CPU and AMD's Threadripper 7980X and Threadripper Pro 7995WX shows that Nvidia's Arm-based chip isn't far behind AMD's powerhouse. The benchmarks come courtesy of Phoronix, which put the three CPUs to the test in various Linux applications, and while it's clear that Grace isn't a champion, it's still impressive.
In the comparison, Phoronix tested a workstation from GPTshop.ai equipped with a Grace-Hopper GH200, which has both a Grace CPU and a Hopper-based H200 GPU. The Grace CPU has 72 cores, 480GB of LPDDR5X memory, and is based on the Arm architecture. Individual Grace chips aren't sold alone; they're only found in CPU-GPU combo devices like GH200 and in the double-chip Grace Superchip. By contrast, Threadripper 7000 features multiple models and can come with up to 1TB of DDR5.
While there were 39 individual tests, Phoronix did not include any overall metric of performance to measure how well Grace did against the 64-core 7980X and 96-core 7995WX. However, we tallied up the wins for each CPU, and ultimately, Grace beat the 7980X in 17 tests and the 7995WX in 15. That means Grace lost more tests than it won, and while this doesn't account for overall performance, we suspect Grace would also be behind. Phoronix also tested the same Grace workstation against AMD's Epyc server CPUs.
This isn't a great result for Grace, but it's not all that bad under the circumstances. Threadripper 7000 enjoys many advantages: many apps are optimized solely for x86 and not Arm, Threadripper 7000 has much more aggressive clock speeds than the efficiency-focused Grace chip and far more L3 cache (7980X has more than double, and the 7995WX more than triple).
The comparison here might not be entirely apples to apples. After all, Grace is designed for servers and is focused on efficiency, while Threadripper is a bona fide workstation chip that pulls out all the stops for maximum performance. Nvidia hasn't disclosed the TDP of a single Grace CPU, and Phoronix didn't have power data to publish. However, the Grace Superchip has a TDP of 500 watts, implying just one Grace has a TDP of 250 watts or more. For comparison, the 7980X and 7995WX are rated for 350 watts, which may mean Grace is more efficient.
Grace also compares favorably to Intel's Sapphire Rapids in terms of efficiency. Benchmarks from earlier this month show Nvidia's server CPU losing to Intel's in raw performance but indicate that the tables are turned regarding efficiency.
