SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
AMD Unveils EPYC 'Milan' 7003 CPUs, Zen 3 Comes to 64-Core Server Chips
AMD unveiled its EPYC 7003 'Milan' processors today, claiming that the chips, which bring the company's powerful Zen 3 architecture to the server market for the first time, take the lead as the world's fastest server processor with its flagship 64-core 128-thread EPYC 7763. Like the rest of the Milan lineup, this chip comes fabbed on the 7nm process and is drop-in compatible with existing servers. AMD claims it brings up to twice the performance of Intel's competing Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh chips in HPC, Cloud, and enterprise workloads, all while offering a vastly better price-to-performance ratio.
Milan's agility lies in the Zen 3 architecture and its chiplet-based design. This microarchitecture brings many of the same benefits that we've seen with AMD's Ryzen 5000 series chips that dominate the desktop PC market, like a 19% increase in IPC and a larger unified L3 cache. Those attributes, among others, help improve AMD's standing against Intel's venerable Xeon lineup in key areas, like single-threaded work, and offer a more refined performance profile across a broader spate of applications.
One interesting new SKU is the EPYC 7663, a 56-core, 112-thread CPU with 7 working cores on each of the 8-core chiplets. There is also a 28-core EPYC 7453.
Next up, Zen 4 "Genoa".
Also at AnandTech, The Next Platform, Phoronix, and Ars Technica.
See also: The Tour of Italy with EPYC Milan: Interview with AMD's Forrest Norrod
AMD video announcement (51m4s) and recap (10m43s)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @04:57AM (2 children)
Linus Tech Tips posted a video the other day speculating that Threadripper might be going away in favor of just making workstation-oriented Epyc boards, but that would be a bummer since enthusiasts and workstation users don't normally need so many memory channels or PCIe lanes but do need higher clocks. And you'd have to pay twice as much for one of these Epyc CPUs that could match the performance of a 5950x consumer CPU even in a highly threaded workstation task (and you couldn't match or even come close to Ryzen for gaming). Hopefully the speculation is wrong and a Zen 3 Threadripper will be coming out in a month or so.
Still, this is good news for people who buy CPUs for datacenters - these are much cheaper and much better performing than Intel's offerings. Intel is risking losing the server market to ARM, just like Sunacle, HP, and IBM lost it to Intel. Server programs don't need PC compatibility all that much. Most of them are writing applications that run in some kind of VM (whether that's Java or Python or whatever) and increasingly the cloud customers don't even know what operating system or hardware they're even using as deployment is increasingly toward interpreted languages in provider-managed containers. AMD is at least making a serious effort toward competing on value.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @07:43AM
As you add cores, ram becomes more and more of a bottleneck. I have a 2990wx (32c/64t) and 128 GB. I run out of ram all the time and can rarely use all the cores since each thread can only use 2 GB each.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 16 2021, @09:13AM
This guy? [reddit.com]
Threadripper is interesting. AMD is whipping Intel in the HEDT space (with Threadripper as well as the "prosumer" 5950X). TR is similar to Epyc, but makes AMD less money than Epyc. So it's less of a priority.
I think AMD might have promised to do more than one release on the sTRX4 socket [wikipedia.org], which would support a Zen 3 TR. "Genesis Peak" is the rumored codename and it may include the re-introduction of a 16-core part [notebookcheck.net].
You're *likely* going to see a Zen 4 successor to the 5950X with 24 cores and a different memory situation due to the switch to DDR5 (partial ECC enabled by default on-die, possibly more memory channels). That is not a replacement for Threadripper's capabilities but might make more sense for some people.
If AMD did decide to replace TR with Epyc, they could probably disable some features and price it accordingly (the $3990 64-core TR 3990X was already more than 50% the price of a 64-core Epyc, and the TR PRO 3995WX is even worse at $5490).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]