NextSilicon Unveils Maverick-2 Processor Delivering Up to 10x GPU Performance with 60% Less Power

NextSilicon, a leader in next-generation computing solutions for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), disclosed architecture and performance details for Maverick-2, the next-generation processor enabling order-of-magnitude better compute for HPC and AI:

• Built on the Intelligent Compute Architecture, the dataflow-enabled hardware adapts to provide peak performance regardless of software branching or parallelism.
• In benchmarks released today, Maverick-2 achieves up to 10x performance over leading GPUs at 60% less power in algorithmically complex workloads.
• Maverick-2's architecture allows everyone to bring their own unmodified code - CUDA, Fortran, etc., to run out-of-the-box with no specific optimizations necessary.
• Also, we're unveiling Arbel, an enterprise-grade high-performance RISC-V core built on TSMC's 5nm process that surpasses current RISC-V competition as well as Intel Lion Cove and AMD Zen 5—the latest generation cores from industry leaders.

Already running at dozens of customer sites worldwide, including Sandia National Laboratories in its Vanguard-II supercomputer, Maverick-2 is revolutionizing workloads across scientific research, HPC, and AI.

"For eight decades, rigid hardware designs have forced software to adapt, with modern processors dedicating roughly 98% of silicon to overhead and just 2% to actual computation,” said Elad Raz, NextSilicon’s Founder and CEO. “Maverick-2 flips this paradigm on its head by devoting the majority of hardware real estate to compute, moving runtime overhead management to intelligent algorithms and software in real-time through our dataflow architecture.”

Designed for increasingly data-intensive and algorithmically complex workloads, whether today’s transformer models or tomorrow’s breakthrough algorithms, Maverick-2 introduces capabilities that conventional GPUs cannot achieve. Enabling out-of-the-box acceleration for both legacy and emerging applications simplifies deployment and future-proofs investments by ensuring flexibility as workloads evolve.

Market Validation

From HPC pioneers to AI innovators at the leading edge of scientific research, web search algorithms, social media analysis, and financial network modeling, Maverick-2 is seeing strong adoption while addressing today’s most demanding workloads with unmatched efficiency.

“Over the past three years, our collaboration with NextSilicon has focused on evaluating emerging architectures for next-generation HPC workloads critical to national security,” said James H. Laros III, Senior Scientist and Vanguard program lead at Sandia National Laboratories. “The out-of-the-box HPCG performance results are impressive, showing real promise for advancing our computational capabilities without the overhead of extensive code modifications. Maverick-2’s dataflow approach demonstrates strong potential in real-world scenarios, and we’re continuing to explore its full performance envelope."

By removing the need for time-consuming code rewrites or proprietary software stacks, Maverick-2 accelerates time-to-results, reduces operational costs, and unlocks new possibilities for applications ranging from agentic AI real-time decision making or advanced reasoning models processing complex queries to modeling irregular data patterns of complex proteins for new medical treatments.

Leadership Performance Out-of-the-Box

NextSilicon also released detailed performance data for Maverick-2 across a wide range of critical HPC benchmarks. The results match or exceed the industry’s most widely deployed accelerators and were achieved using unmodified, out-of-the-box application code, with no specialized programming, vendor-specific optimizations, or lengthy porting cycles.

Full benchmarking results are available at www.nextsilicon.com/maverick, with highlights including:

• PageRank: 10x higher graph analytics performance than leading GPUs, enabling workloads on 25GB+ graph sizes that GPUs cannot process.
• GUPS (Giga-Updates Per Second): 32.6 GUPS at 460 watts, 22x faster than CPUs and nearly 6x faster than GPUs, for high-throughput databases and AI inference.
• HPCG (High-Performance Conjugate Gradients): 600 GFLOPS at 750 watts, matching leading GPUs at half the power and delivering performance-per-watt comparable to the world's Top 500 systems..
• STREAM: Validated full performance HBM3e for your most demanding applications.

Silicon, Not Slideware

As an exploration of future architecture, NextSilicon today also unveiled Arbel, an enterprise-grade RISC-V core using its own patented intellectual property (IP) on TSMC’s 5nm process. Designed from the ground up to stand toe-to-toe with offerings from AMD and Intel. The test chip demonstrates NextSilicon’s ability to build world-class IP and explore multiple strategic paths from vertically integrated solutions to enabling a broader RISC-V ecosystem in datacenter environments.

“We don’t just talk about innovation, we build it in silicon while others share roadmaps,” stated Raz. “As AI and HPC workloads evolve, Maverick-2’s intelligent, adaptive design ensures our customers' investments remain future-proof while delivering unparalleled performance today. With its pioneering dataflow architecture already transforming computing, and Arbel showcasing our ability to engineer world-class, general-purpose silicon, we’re setting a bold new standard for what’s possible."