Benchmarks
Everything below is measured, dated and reproducible, including the results that go against us. NITROBENCH 4 is our own harness — that is a conflict of interest, so we publish the harness, the profiles and the raw run files, and we print the third-party index next to ours where they disagree.
01The headline
Against 870 MB/s from a retail Mk V on the same profile on the same day. A 36% lead at a typical resident set, and a lead we lose entirely past 22 residents.
02Throughput
- Nitrosoft, generation 5
- Cybrscape, measured by us
- Nitrosoft, generation 4
Cybrscape units measured 14 June 2029: two retail Mk V, two retail Mk IV, unmodified firmware. Our measurements of retail hardware, not their published specification. If they measure differently we would like to see the profile.
Figures
| Unit | MB/s |
|---|---|
| NX5/X | 1,180 |
| Mk V | 870 |
| NX5/T | 690 |
| NX4/T | 520 |
| Mk IV | 430 |
| NX5/S | 410 |
- Nitrosoft, generation 5
- Cybrscape, measured by us
- Nitrosoft, generation 4
The NX4/T wins this outright because the tooling is paid for and we have stopped amortising it. That is not engineering, it is accounting, and it is the honest reason a previous-generation deck tops this chart.
Figures
| Unit | cr (lower is better) |
|---|---|
| NX4/T | 654 |
| NX5/X | 949 |
| NX5/T | 1,072 |
| NX5/S | 1,195 |
| Mk V | 1,931 |
| Mk IV | 2,233 |
03The crossover
Where we stop winning
- NX5/X
- Mk V
A wide fold table costs lookup time. Up to about eighteen residents we are ahead by a wide margin; at 22 the curves cross; at thirty the Mk V holds 505 MB/s against our 250. If your working set is routinely wider than twenty residents, buy theirs. We would rather lose one sale than acquire a support case that was never going to end well.
Figures
| Resident | NX5/X (MB/s) | Mk V (MB/s) |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 1,180 | 870 |
| 6 | 1,176 | 868 |
| 10 | 1,168 | 862 |
| 14 | 1,140 | 848 |
| 18 | 1,010 | 812 |
| 22 | 720 | 744 |
| 26 | 430 | 640 |
| 30 | 250 | 505 |
04Residency
- Physical blocks
- Effective blocks, folded
Memory is the scarce resource in every deck ever built. Nothing in this chart changes that. What changes is the ratio between the two bars.
Figures
| Unit | Physical | Effective | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| G1 NX1 | 12 | 13.4 | 1.12x |
| G2 NX2 | 16 | 19.0 | 1.19x |
| G3 NX3 | 20 | 26.6 | 1.33x |
| G4 NX4 | 24 | 35.0 | 1.46x |
| G5 NX5 | 24 | 41.3 | 1.72x |
Why the ratio is the honest metric
A block count is a number about a board. A fold ratio is a number about your work. Two decks with the same twenty-four blocks will hold different amounts depending entirely on how repetitive your resident set turns out to be.
Our figures use a fixed mixed set — nineteen residents, three Barrier probes, two Ward wrappers, a Sentry sweeper and thirteen utilities — specified page-for-page in the harness. A set of nineteen genuinely unique residents folds to about 1.08× on our hardware, which is to say barely at all. We publish that case too; it is profile 34 and it is one of the nine we expect to lose.
The incumbent’s Mk V measures 1.08× on the same set with 28 physical blocks, giving 30.2 effective. Four more blocks of silicon than ours, eleven fewer blocks of work.
05Third party
The index we did not write
The Open Deck Index is a consortium figure. We submit hardware to it, we do not run it, and we do not get to choose the profiles. Index 100 is the median deck in their sample.
We lead on throughput and residency by a wide margin, lead narrowly on ICE traversal, and lose on trace discipline, acoustics and service turnaround. Two of those three are the same two things we lose on our own harness. The third — service turnaround at 64 against 161 — is the worst number on this site.
We are not going to contextualise a 64. It means our service department is well below the median deck supplier and a long way below the incumbent’s. What we are doing about it is on the support page, with the targets we currently miss.
- NX5/X
- Mk V (measured)
Published by the consortium. We submit hardware; we do not run the tests and we do not see the profiles in advance.
Figures
| Metric | NX5/X | Mk V |
|---|---|---|
| Cache throughput | 168 | 124 |
| Resident set density | 181 | 112 |
| ICE traversal | 143 | 131 |
| Trace discipline | 129 | 152 |
| Acoustic | 71 | 148 |
| Service turnaround | 64 | 161 |
06Head to head
NX5/X against the incumbent Mk V
| Measure | NX5/X | Mk V | Ahead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physical blocksThey have more memory than we do. | 24 | 28 | Cybrscape |
| Effective blocks (folded)And we hold more in it. | 41.3 | 30.2 | Nitrosoft |
| Sustained throughput | 1,180 MB/s | 870 MB/s | Nitrosoft |
| Credits per 100 MB/s | 949 | 1,931 | Nitrosoft |
| ICE traversal, median | 14 ms | 17 ms | Nitrosoft |
| Trace floor at idleTheirs is quieter on the wire. We are working on it. | 1.6 /min | 1.4 /min | Cybrscape |
| Noise under sustained loadNot close. Ours is a loud deck. | 41 dB(A) | 21 dB(A) | Cybrscape |
| Warranty | 12 months | 36 months | Cybrscape |
| Median first support replyTheir service department is better than ours. | 14 h | 2 h | Cybrscape |
| Generations shipped since 2026 | 5 | 2 | Nitrosoft |
Cybrscape is a good company that builds a good deck and has a better service department than ours. We compete with them on throughput, on residency and on credits per unit of work, and we expect to keep losing on warranty, noise and support until we fix those — which are engineering and hiring problems, not marketing ones.
07Method
How every figure was taken
Conditions
- Ambient 24 °C ± 0.5, still air, enclosure closed and screwed shut.
- Thirty-minute unbroken run. The reported figure is the mean of the final twenty-five minutes, so warm-up and any throttle are inside it.
- Twelve runs per figure, median reported, full spread in the run file.
- Stock firmware, factory settings, no fold-table overrides, no thermal override.
- Mains supply through a regulator; draw measured at the wall.
- Noise at one metre, on-axis, in a room with a 17 dB(A) floor.
Profiles
Forty-one profiles in NITROBENCH 4. The headline mixed set is profile 12: nineteen residents, three Barrier probes, two Ward wrappers, one Sentry sweeper, thirteen utilities, specified page-for-page. Nine profiles are deliberate stress cases we expect to lose, including profile 34 — nineteen genuinely unique residents, where our fold ratio collapses to 1.08×.
The competitor units
two retail Mk V, two retail Mk IV, unmodified firmware, bought at retail through an ordinary supply desk, measured 14 June 2029. Unmodified firmware, factory settings, same room, same day, same profile set. These are our measurements and we label them that way everywhere they appear; they are not Cybrscape’s specification and should not be quoted as such.
Conflict of interest
NITROBENCH 4 is ours. We wrote the harness, chose the profiles and ran the hardware, and a supplier’s own benchmark is worth exactly as much as its method is inspectable. So: the harness ships in the SDK under nitro bench, the profile definitions ship with it, and the signed run files for every figure on this page are in the SDK archive. Run it yourself. If you get a different number we would rather hear about it than not.
What we will not publish
Figures for hardware we have not measured ourselves. Extrapolations. Peak-burst numbers without the sustained number beside them. Anything from a run we could not reproduce at least nine times out of twelve.
08Cadence
Figures
| Generation | Deck | Shipped | Blocks | Fold | MB/s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| G1 | NX1 | March 2026 | 12 | 1.12x | 120 |
| G2 | NX2 | December 2026 | 16 | 1.19x | 215 |
| G3 | NX3 | September 2027 | 20 | 1.33x | 390 |
| G4 | NX4 | July 2028 | 24 | 1.46x | 700 |
| G5 | NX5 | April 2029 | 24 | 1.72x | 1,180 |
G1: Bench only. 40 units, all hand-finished, all replaced free. G2: First unit anyone paid for. Hotfloor 1.4 introduced block folding. G3: Eviction prediction lands. Support queue triples; see /support. G4: Still shipping as the NX4/T. Firmware supported to July 2033. G5: Same twenty-four blocks as G4. That is the entire point of it.