Nvidia Vera CPU: Full Specs, Benchmark Results, and the Rosa Follow-Up

Citi analysts expressed surprise at the early unveiling of the Vera Rubin platform at CES 2026. They stated there is upside to $500 billion in AI demand from the Blackwell/Rubin roadmap .

Vera CPU — Technical Specifications

Nvidia designed Vera from the ground up for AI factories. Key specifications from Nvidia's developer blog and detailed hardware analyses :

Nvidia also states that Vera delivers up to 50% faster sandbox performance versus competitive platforms and 80% faster sandbox environment performance than traditional CPU infrastructure . CEO Jensen Huang highlighted the new Vera chip, targeting a $200 billion market .

Vera CPU — Benchmark Results

The first widely reported independent benchmarks came from Phoronix on May 26, 2026, testing a single-socket Vera system at Nvidia's Santa Clara headquarters . These were Nvidia-hosted, curated tests, meaning results may not fully generalize to all third-party workloads .

Key results from the Phoronix geometric mean:

• 1.55x faster than Intel's flagship Xeon 6980P (Granite Rapids)
• ~10% ahead of AMD's EPYC 9575F (64 Zen 5 cores)
• 1.6–1.63x faster than Nvidia's own prior-generation Grace CPU
• 90% STREAM TRIAD efficiency — sustained memory bandwidth utilization
• 20-second Linux kernel compilation time
• 1.5x overall performance vs 128-core x86 CPUs

Independent validation from Redpanda: In their own benchmarks comparing Vera against five other systems, Redpanda found Vera delivered the lowest streaming latencies across the board, the best interconnect scaling, and the fastest build times with up to 73% higher throughput than AMD EPYC “Turin” .

Caveat: As Tom's Hardware noted, these were curated tests at Nvidia's Santa Clara facility, so results may not generalize to all workloads .

Rosa CPU — What Is Known

Rosa is the confirmed follow-up to Vera, named after Nobel Prize-winning medical physicist Rosalyn Sussman Yalow. It belongs to the Feynman generation and is expected in 2028 .

Confirmed from Nvidia:

• Core architecture: New Rigel core, based on Arm v9.2 ISA
• Goal: Higher per-core performance than Vera's Olympus core while maintaining the same die area
• Key improvements: Better instruction delivery, larger L2 cache, more efficient memory handling
• Platform: Pairs with the Feynman GPU (next-gen data center GPU architecture) and connects with BlueField-5 DPU and ConnectX-10 SuperNIC
• Target workload: Optimized for agentic AI
• Cadence: Nvidia shortened the CPU development cycle from ~4 years to ~2 years

Rumored/Reported (not officially confirmed by Nvidia):

• Process node: May use TSMC N2 (2nm) or possibly skip straight to A16 (1.6nm-class) with Super Power Rail backside power delivery
• Consumer PC variant (Rosa Feynman Spark) reportedly planned for 2030

Summary: Rosa is a same-die-area performance-per-core upgrade over Vera's Olympus core, built on Arm v9.2 Rigel architecture, launching in 2028 as part of the Feynman platform. Process node details (2nm vs A16) are still speculative.