AMD has organized a technology day, called the EPYC tech day, which is also the launch event and we got to see and talk with a couple of key people involved in the process.
AMD’s Corporate Vice President, John Taylor, kicked off the event, reminding us about a few key things that happened in Q2 2017. AMD has scored an Apple iMac Pro and Macbook Pro with Radeon graphics, and Ryzen got a few awards for coming back with a competitive desktop line.
John pointed out that Alienware's General Manager, the legendary Frank Azor, was so excited to score exclusivity on the Threadreapper that it had to hug its own desktop. Alienware is in for a bit of boost by scoring exclusivity on this product for 2017.
Microsoft announced that the Xbox One X is powered by AMD's SoC, but again, the event was all in the light of EPYC.
Before we go further to any details, AMD EPYC is an enterprise, server/cloud data center product that will put an incredible lot of pressure on Intel's server roadmap. AMD offers top to bottom solutions by having eight, sixteen, twenty-four and thirty-two core products.
Scott Aylor, Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Solutions, described to us a five-year journey that resulted in the EPYC server platform. The platform is built on three major pillars. EPYC was designed for Power, Optimization, and Security.
The key thing is, of course, the industry's learning performance with leadership with a core count - 32 - and supremacy in memory and I/O over the competition. Well, guess what? AMD managed to outperform Intel’s Boardwell-E based server top to bottom in almost all of these criteria.
Naples or EPYC 7601, in its full 32-core and 64-thread glory, is putting a lot of pressure on Broadwell E5 2699 V4 and giving up to 45 percent higher performance in the 2P Integer Specint Rate base 2006 benchmark.
The same CPU scores 75 percent higher performance in the 2P floating point score.
AMD has eight memory channels per CPU, double the number of Intel’s best solution and can address up to 2 TB per CPU. The system has 128 PCI lanes and the Intel single socket only has 40. The Intel dual socket only has 40+40, a total of 80. The EPYC is server compatible with the next gen EPYC processors.
There are four different processor lines. The top of the line is the 32-core SKU that will launch with three different iterations. It will be followed by two 24-core EPYC processors and four 16-core EPYCs. There will also be an eight core with sixteen threads processor.
The TDP is ranging from 180W for the 32-core top of the end 7601 to 120W for EPYC 7251 eight-core solution with 2.1GHz based frequency and 2.9GHz max boost.
More to come.
