Nvidia’s Blackwell raises the bar with new MLPerf Inference V5.0 results

Fifteen partners, including Cisco, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell Technologies, Oracle, and Google Cloud, were involved in the latest round of MLPerf testing, which, he noted, was the largest number of Nvidia partners submitting to the benchmark in any given round.

When asked about his overall impression on the latest results, Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research, said, “the first thing is that MLPerf continues to adjust to the demands of the market and now reaches to the level of genAI. It still doesn’t reach agentic AI, but it will get there in future releases.”

The second, he said, is “everyone benefits from continued optimizations. We see this on both CPUs and GPUs, especially with the move to FP4 by Nvidia. Note that they are the only ones supporting FP4 at this time. And third, Nvidia keeps pushing the limits with each generation while improving the performance, through continued optimizations, of older generations.”

“What DeepSeek did in terms of changing the game was show the world what was possible,” he said. “This is another big innovative step forward. Some, frankly incorrectly, surmised that because of some of their innovations that you wouldn’t need nearly as much infrastructure to deliver AI, but that is not really a correct understanding of what DeepSeek did. Yes, they delivered algorithmic advances which can reduce the amount of time required to do very complex operations. But you know, if you’ve seen the trend line in AI over the years, AI does not take a step back.”

AI moves forward, Salvator agreed, “and what does that enable? It enables us to do more on the infrastructure we have today, and then even more on the infrastructure we’ll have tomorrow. That has been the typical sort of trend line you see when algorithmic innovations come, they enable the next round of activity, the next round of sophistication to come to AI. In this case, it’s agentic AI.”

Although it wasn’t ready for the current round of benchmarking, Salvator pointed out that the company’s Dynamo open source inferencing software, introduced at GTC 2025, will up the ante even further.