[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang (황치규)] Nvidia has unveiled its next-generation CPU, dubbed Vera, for agentic AI, SiliconANGLE reported on March 16 (local time).

CPUs have been widely seen as playing a smaller role than GPUs in the AI boom. Nvidia is stressing that CPUs will be central in AI agents. It said AI agents require not only GPU performance but also data movement, verification and orchestration, which are tasks optimised for CPUs.

The company said Vera is designed to give CPUs a leading role, rather than serving merely as support, in AI factories. Based on the Arm architecture, it is 50 percent faster and twice as efficient as existing x86-based CPUs.

Vera includes 88 custom Olympus cores to handle concurrent workloads. It offers 1.2 TB/s bandwidth with LPDDR5X memory while cutting power consumption in half. Nvidia also unveiled a Vera-based CPU rack system.

The system integrates 256 Vera chips to handle large-scale AI workloads. Through the NVL72 platform, which links 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs, it supports data transfers that are 7 times faster than sixth-generation PCIe.

Major companies including Dell, HPE and Lenovo plan to launch Vera-based servers, and Oracle, Meta and Alibaba also plan to adopt Vera. Nvidia plans to launch Vera-based systems in the second half of this year.