NVIDIA’s Olympus Core: Pushing Server Single Threaded Performance Boundaries

Server chips traditionally offered less single threaded performance than contemporary client parts. Higher core counts translate to less power per core, and the complex interconnect required to connect many cores often suffer from higher latency as well. However, that trend has been narrowing. AMD’s recent server chips have been pushing higher frequencies over the last couple generations. NVIDIA’s Olympus is another aggressive move to push server single threaded performance forward, but approaches the problem from a different angle by focusing more on performance per clock.To deliver on that front, Olympus takes a similar approach to Arm’s Cortex X925. Growing core structures tends to run into diminishing returns, so Olympus diverges from Arm’s approach with a simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) implementation. The result is a monster core that is a force to be reckoned with in the server scene, and one that gets very close to desktop performance.OverviewOlympus is a 10-wide…