Every chipmaker says theirs is the fastest. MLPerf is where they have to show it under the same rules, in front of their competitors. Here's how to read the result without falling for the ad.
Picture a car magazine that drives every car on the same track, on the same day, with the same driver. Each brand's ad says something different. The track shows one thing. MLPerf is the track.
The three words that decide it
Closed or open division. In the closed one the model is fixed and the comparison is fair. In the open one you can swap the model or retrain it, so the numbers don't compare directly with the others.
Available, preview or research. Available means you can buy or rent it today. Preview means the system must be submittable as available in the next round. Research means experimental or internal hardware. Before you believe the big number in the headline, check which box it came from.
An example from September 2026: in MLPerf Inference v6.1 NVIDIA submitted Vera Rubin NVL72 for the first time, as a preview result. By NVIDIA's numbers the system delivers up to 3.7 times the throughput of the previous generation, GB300 NVL72. The result is in the closed division, but it's for a machine that still has to become available.