Bank of America: Agent CPU Standards Battle, NVIDIA "Faster" vs AMD "More"

According to TechFlow Research, Bank of America's July 22 report pointed out that NVIDIA and AMD are engaged in a battle for definition in the Agent CPU field. NVIDIA unveiled the Vera CPU architecture last week, featuring 88 custom ARM cores and 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth, arguing that single-core performance determines agent response speed, emphasizing "faster". AMD responded at Thursday's AI Day, stating that its EPYC 9965 rack-level throughput in a 100kW deployment is already 2.4 times that of Vera, arguing that concurrent throughput determines production-grade AI efficiency, emphasizing "more". BofA believes the underlying thread of the x86 vs ARM battle is equally critical; the decades of optimization barriers of x86 in the enterprise software stack cannot be replaced overnight. BofA expects AMD will redefine metrics rather than compete on benchmarks; the real winner is the one that can get the industry to accept its framework. BofA maintains Buy ratings for NVIDIA and AMD, with price targets of $350 and $620 respectively, believing this is not a zero-sum game, both can win, just via different paths.