A closer look at Verano, AMD's first step toward a Zen-based superchip to rival Nvidia's Vera Rubin
Cores, clocks, memory, and interconnects all perfectly balanced for a singular mission: keeping instinct fed.
Verano, AMD's first foray into a Zen-based superchip, aims to rival Nvidia's Vera Rubin. Unlike general-purpose Epyc CPUs, Verano is tailored for AMD's GPU servers. Madhu Rangarajan, CVP of AMD's compute and enterprise AI products, described Verano as a step towards building a superchip more similar to Nvidia's Vera Rubin. Rangarajan noted that Verano is designed for an integrated CPU+GPU rack scale solution, not as a competitor to Vera, but rather as a competitor to the Vera+GPU combination.
Each of Nvidia's superchips combines an 88-core CPU with 1.5 TB of memory and a pair of GPUs via NVLink-C2C interconnect. Verano, too, will host similar GPUs, but unlike Nvidia's superchips, Verano will use notebook memory instead of RDIMMS. Verano's core count, clock speeds, memory bandwidth, power, and I/O have been optimized to ensure its GPUs are well-fed, unlike the more versatile nature of Vera.
The chip features a custom pair of I/O dies to attach four LPDDR5X memory controllers, allowing for up to 8,533 MT/s. This design choice results in a 30-40% reduction in power consumption and a more compact footprint for liquid cooling compared to RDIMMS. However, Verano will not be socketed but will instead use a ball-grid array (BGA) for easier integration with GPUs.
AMD's xGMI interconnect, replacing PCIe, offers 112 Gbps per lane, significantly improving CPU-to-GPU communication compared to previous AMD GPUs.
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