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posted by martyb on Monday March 15 2021, @11:06PM   Printer-friendly

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)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @05:12AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @05:12AM (#1124733)

    Looks like 7nm is getting mature enough that AMD is shipping a lot of silicon with seven working cores as six-core CPUs. It makes sense that AMD would want to refine their binning. The 5600 was available in quantity before the 5800 was, and I've seen 5900s in stock (once) at Microcenter but have never seen a 5950. If seven-core silicon is coming out of the factory, AMD is leaving money on the table selling it with only six enabled.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 16 2021, @09:38AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday March 16 2021, @09:38AM (#1124771) Journal

    I think the move to the unified 8-core core complex (CCX) is what makes the 7-core chiplet possible, or at least make more sense. They didn't want irregular amounts of cores on Zen 2 CCXs, or it was not possible to disable a core on a CCX without disabling a core on the other one. Each of the 7 cores can access the full 32 MB of L3 cache.

    TSMC "7nm" was already mature to the point that many perfectly good 8-core chiplets have been neutered into 6-cores. There is already slight variance in performance of chips due to the silicon lottery, so a chiplet used for a 6-core might be tolerated in an 8-core.

    Zen 4 is going to be one to watch for the binning. It's assumed that it will increase core counts by 50% on at least some product lines (no "mainstream" 24-core would be a disappointment). They can do that by adding more 8-core chiplets or switching to a 12-core chiplet. A recent leak points to 8-core chiplets [notebookcheck.net] again, but 12-core would probably be better for consumers since it could force 6-core out of the picture, improve latency across 12 cores on a single chiplet (for workloads or games that can use 12 cores), enable a cheap single chiplet 10-core, etc.

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