AMD finally released it’s initial batch of server CPU’s, under the regretful name EPYC. As promised in their announcement, the chips truly offer some interesting capabilities. No matter which EPYC 7000-series chip you buy, you get some impressive features standard: 8-channel DDR4 memory support (up to 2TB supported), 64MB of L3 cache, and 128 lanes of sweet PCIe 3.0.
In a dual-socket configuration, that’s a lot of IO. But all of those lanes are also available in single socket servers as well. For dual-socket configs, the platform uses 64 lanes from each CPU for intersocket connectivity via AMD’s Infinity Fabric, offering a bidirectional bandwidth of 37.9 GB/s.
With 128-threads and a whole mess of IO in a 2P server, it’ll be interesting to see what companies and applications migrate to EYPC.
AnandTech comments:
The big news out of AMD was the launch of Zen, the new high-performance core that is designed to underpin the product roadmap for the next few generations of products. To much fanfare, AMD launched consumer level parts based on Zen, called Ryzen, earlier this year. There was a lot of discussion in the consumer space about these parts and the competitiveness, and despite the column inches dedicated to it, Ryzen wasn’t designed to be the big story this year. That was left to their server generation of products, which are designed to take a sizeable market share and reinvigorate AMD’s bottom line on the finance sheet. A few weeks ago AMD announced the naming of the new line of enterprise-class processors, called EPYC, and today marks the official launch with configurations up to 32 cores and 64 threads per processor. We also got an insight into several features of the design, including the AMD Infinity Fabric.
Read more at: AMD’s Future in Servers: New 7000-Series CPUs Launched and EPYC Analysis
