AMD EPYC Venice Crushes Nvidia Vera in Early Server Tests

AMD's upcoming EPYC Venice server processors have shown impressive performance gains in early tests. The flagship 256-core EPYC 9996 model, based on the Zen 6 architecture, outpaced Nvidia's Vera platform by up to 124% (2.24x) in SPEC CPU 2026 intrate tests.

This significant jump in power also puts AMD's processor ahead of Intel's Xeon 6980P by 137% (2.37x). When compared to the previous generation, the EPYC 9965, the new top-of-the-range model achieves a 78% increase in performance.

Direct core-by-core comparisons against Nvidia Vera's 88 cores show AMD's option was approximately 20% faster overall and about 8% better per core. The Venice processor also demonstrated an 18% advantage over Vera in memory bandwidth tests using Stream.

The benchmarks used GCC 16.1 compiler, which may have influenced the results compared to Nvidia's previous figures shared with a different compiler version (GCC 15.2).