AMD has completed development of the fourth generation EPYC processors, designed for mission-critical workloads in the cloud (opens in a new tab)enterprise and high performance computing (HPC).
Unveiled at the San Francisco event, AMD says the launch will deliver greater energy efficiency and help customers speed up their data center modernization process.
The AMD Zen 4 lineup has been divided into three families: the standard Zen 4 for EPYC Genoa, the compute-density-optimized Zen 4C for EPYC Bergamo, and the cache-optimized Zen 4 V-Cache within the EPYC Genoa-X series.
Fourth generation EPYC
With up to 96 cores in a single processor, AMD says the new EPYC lineup should allow customers to deploy fewer but more powerful servers to meet their individual computing needs, which in turn will apparently provide more flexibility in the data center.
The fourth generation of data center backbone technology takes a more holistic approach to simplifying and scaling connectivity as well as a full set of infrastructure services.
said Ram Peddibhotla, vice president of product management for EPYC TechRadar Pro that the features of the 4th generation EPYC that make it the highest performing server processor include three parts and start at the core.
“We’ve been on the road of improving our core, and with Zen 4 we have very strong cores. They are paired with 5nm process nodes – this combination provides very good performance at the slot level and at the professional core level,” he says.
“We’ve built enough of these cores in a bundle, so we’re able to deliver 96 cores in a bundle. When you have so many strong cores, it delivers phenomenal performance. The third feature is the energy efficiency of it. We don’t just look at the efficiency itself, but we look at what energy is used.”
AMD is confident that these processors will help bridge the gap between companies in meeting their sustainability goals and will deliver real dividends.
Continuing, Peddibhotla says his customers can save very tangible amounts of energy and lower their energy costs by using EPYC.
“In a very typical scenario, if you have 15 Intel servers (opens in a new tab) that are deployed instead of deploying them, you can get the same performance by deploying five EPYC servers, which uses less than half the energy,” he continues.
“This translates directly to energy savings and sustainability benefits as there is a carbon footprint associated with energy production. In this 15 vs. 5 example, the difference between the two sides is 25 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s equivalent to what 30 acres of forest in the US can remove from the atmosphere.”
The Zen 4 solution contains up to 12 CCDs, 96 cores and 192 threads, and each CCD is equipped with 32 MB of L3 cache and 1 MB of L2 cache per core (Zen 3 offers 512 KB per core).
“Data center operators are trying to solve many challenges and EPYC is a very attractive solution for data center operators in terms of overall performance, whether it’s the number of things the data center operator is trying to do or how fast they are trying to get things done. case,” added Peddibhotla.
“It’s also a good answer to the footprint – you can get so much more out of each rack, which is extremely valuable to the data center. If you think about the number of racks that can fit in a data center, we can get twice as much capacity out of those racks, which would be the equivalent of building another data center – but for free.”
Available on-premises or in the cloud, the 4th generation AMD EPYC processor series is an extension of AMD Infinity Guard, a set of features that provide physical and virtual layers of protection. In addition, AMD has doubled the number of encryption keys compared to previous generations to help its customers keep data stored in the cloud or on storage secure.