Modal reported Oct. 19 that Nvidia’s Vera CPU delivered up to twice the task throughput of a comparable Intel machine in a concurrent internal benchmark, a result relevant to Sandboxes host capacity.
Sandboxes provides isolated environments for running code, and Modal says its hosts can support hundreds of containers and virtual machines. The company says an individual workload’s CPU use can spike to 10 times its baseline during software installation, raising competition for host resources. Modal argues that greater concurrent throughput could let it place more jobs on each host; the benchmark did not measure customer deployments.
Modal drew its test workloads from 50 Terminal-Bench oracle solutions and their verifiers. It ran them in prewarmed Docker containers with network calls removed, timing coding-related CPU work such as compilation, file searches and Git operations. Complete sessions run by live coding agents were outside the test.
With jobs running together, Modal reported that Vera completed up to twice as many tasks as an equivalent Intel Granite Rapids system. It said individual task times were similar or sometimes shorter on Vera. Its separate one-at-a-time runs showed smaller, uneven gains.
Sandboxes currently runs on x86 processors. Modal says it must adapt its infrastructure and software image-building system to support Arm-compatible Vera. Nvidia says Vera has 88 custom Olympus cores and LPDDR5X memory bandwidth of up to 1.2 terabytes per second. Modal received its first Vera server the week before the Oct. 19 post, but has not announced when customers may gain access.
