US-based technology major AMD today announced the launch of its EPYC processor brand for datacenters. OEMs will launch the first EPYC-based servers in June.
AMD said EPYC aims to revolutionize the dual-socket server market while simultaneously reshaping expectations for single-socket servers
EPYC (previously codenamed Naples) processors targeting cloud-based and traditional on-premise datacenters will deliver the Zen x86 processing engine scaling up to 32 physical cores.
EPYC features
# 32-core System-on-a-chip (SoC) design, with support for two high-performance threads per core
# memory bandwidth with 8 channels of memory per EPYC device.
# In a dual-socket server, support for up to 32 DIMMS of DDR4 on 16 memory channels, delivering up to 4 terabytes of total memory capacity
# SoC with integrated, I/O supporting 128 lanes of PCIe 3, negating the need for separate chip
“We believe that this new product line-up has the potential to reshape significant portions of the datacenter market with its unique combination of performance, design flexibility, and disruptive TCO,” said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager of Enterprise, Embedded & Semi-Custom Products.
Dropbox is evaluating AMD EPYC CPUs in-house.
“We are impressed with the performance we see across workloads in single-socket configurations,” said Akhil Gupta, vice president of infrastructure at Dropbox.
“Today’s single-socket server offerings push buyers toward purchasing a more expensive two-socket server just to get the memory bandwidth and I/O they need to support the compute performance of the cores,” said Matthew Eastwood, senior vice president, IDC.
EPYC processor exceeded the performance of a competitive mid-range, two-socket / two-processor platform in a head-to-head comparison. EPYC exceeds competitive offering on critical parameters, with 45 percent more cores, 60 percent more input/output capacity (I/O), and 122 percent more memory bandwidth.
