NUVIA Published New Details On Their Phoenix CPU, Talks Up Big Performance/Perf-Per-Watt

Since leaving stealth last year and hiring some prominent Linux/open-source veterans to complement their ARM processor design experts, we have been quite eager to hear more about this latest start-up aiming to deliver compelling ARM server products. Today they shared some early details on their initial "Phoenix" processor that is coming within their "Orion" SoC.

The first-generation Phoenix CPU is said to have a "complete overhaul" of the CPU pipeline and is a custom core based on the ARM architecture. They believe that Phoenix+Orion will be able to take on Intel/AMD x86_64 CPUs not only in raw performance but also in performance-per-Watt.

NUVIA shared some early numbers using Geekbench 5, to which the Phoenix performance-per-Watt looks compelling against mobile and laptop hardware from the Apple A13 to Ryzen 7 4700U and Core i7 8750H. But even with making assumptions around Ice Lake Server as well as fellow ARM server competitors the Ampere Altra and Amazon Graviton 2, they believe they are in good shape.

They conclude the NUVIA blog post with, "We realize the companies we have measured against in these tests are not standing still and will have new products in the market over the next 18 months. That said, we believe that even with significant performance gains (20%+) with new CPU architectures, we will continue to hold a clear position of leadership in performance-per-watt. By delivering this step-function increase in performance, NUVIA will provide the foundation needed to power the next era of cloud computing."

It will be interesting to see what they come up with as more details on NUVIA Phoenix comes to light and ultimately seeing how it stacks up against AMD EPYC 7003 (Zen 3) and Intel Ice Lake Xeon when the time comes.