Modal will run agent Sandboxes on NVIDIA Vera CPUs: up to 2x the throughput of comparable x86 under heavy load
Modal said in an October 19 blog post that it will add NVIDIA's Arm-based Vera CPU to power Modal Sandboxes, its first step beyond an all-x86 fleet. Using Agentless Agent Bench, a 50-task suite built from Terminal-Bench, Modal measured up to 2x the task throughput of a comparable x86 GNR machine under heavy concurrency, with per-task latency equal or lower (vendor figures). On an idle host running tasks serially, Vera's edge was small. The capacity targets background coding agents and reinforcement learning rollouts.
Key Takeaways
- Throughput: under heavy concurrency Vera reached up to 2x the task throughput of a comparable x86 GNR machine, with per-task latency equal or lower (Modal early tests, vendor figures).
- Benchmark: Agentless Agent Bench uses 50 Terminal-Bench oracle solutions and verifiers with network calls removed, isolating CPU work such as compilation, grep, git and device emulation.
- Idle serial runs: across the 50 tasks Vera was often but not always faster, and not by a large margin; the gap opens under contention.
- Why: Modal credits Vera's high memory bandwidth for packing more containers per core without throttling; x86 alternatives plateaued earlier as CPU counts rose.
- Rollout: this is Modal's first Arm support and needs infrastructure and image-build changes; no launch date or pricing was announced.
Linked Models & Agents:
