With the Dell Pro Max GB10 testing at Phoronix we have been focused on the AI performance with its Blackwell GPU as the GB10 superchip was designed for meeting the needs of AI. Many Phoronix readers have also been curious about the GB10’s CPU performance in more traditional Linux workloads. So for those curious about the GB10 CPU performance, here are some Linux benchmarks focused today on the CPU performance and going up against the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" within the Framework Desktop.

The NVIDIA GB10 superchip features 20 Arm cores made up of ten Cortex-X925 cores and ten lower-power Cortex-A725 cores. Paired with the 128GB of LPDDR5x memory, the twenty AArch64 cores offer a decent amount of CPU power beyond the Blackwell GPU. For quantifying the CPU performance of the GB10’s Arm cores, I ran a variety of different Linux CPU benchmarks on the Dell Pro Max GB10 compared to the Framework Desktop with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 Strix Halo SoC.

While the AMD and Intel SoCs allow reading the CPU power consumption via Linux’s PowerCap/RAPL interfaces, the NVIDIA GB10 didn’t expose any CPU power metrics via these interfaces and thus for the power aspect was relying on the total AC system power consumption for both of these systems. A WattsUp Pro power monitor was tracking the AC power consumption in real-time for the Dell Pro Max GB10 and Framework Desktop for being able to compare the performance-per-Watt.

Both of these systems were running Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS (NVIDIA DGX OS is currently based on Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS) with the Linux 6.14 kernel and GCC 13.3 compiler. Thanks to Dell for having provided the Pro Max GB10 for testing at Phoronix as well as for Framework Computer having supplied the review sample of the Strix Halo Framework Desktop.