AMD has reiterated it plans to start shipments of its 3rd Generation EPYC processors for servers in late 2020.
The new CPUs are expected to increase performance compared to existing server platforms and will therefore strengthen AMD’s positions on the lucrative datacenter market.
“We remain on track to begin shipping our next generation Milan server processor featuring Zen 3 late this year,” Lisa Su, CEO of AMD said on the company's recent call.
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AMD’s 3rd Generation EPYC 7003-series processors are based on the Zen 3 microarchitecture that is expected to increase IPC performance. The new CPUs will continue to use multi-chip module (MCM) design, but each core complex die (CCD) will have a new internal arrangement that packs all eight cores into one core complex (CCX) with a unified ‘32+ MB’ L3 cache in a bid to cut latencies and improve per core performance.
Incoming
AMD’s upcoming processors will continue to feature up to 64 cores, but microarchitectural improvements and, perhaps, increased clocks are projected to make them better performers when compared to existing AMD EPYC CPUs at the same TDP.
“Milan is a very competitive product and our goal is to really satisfy a broad swath of the server workloads and we think we have the capabilities of doing that,” said Su.
CPU shipments to server makers do not necessarily mean broad and immediate availability of servers running AMD’s upcoming EPYC 7003-series ‘Milan’ processors. Lead time for servers and quite long, so the new machines will be broadly available in 2021. Meanwhile, the new processors will continue to use existing sockets and other infrastructure, so it will be relatively easy for server makers to adopt the new CPUs. Given higher performance and compatibility with existing designs, the EPYC 7003-series will further strengthen AMD’s positions on the server market.
It is noteworthy that AMD’s EPYC ‘Milan’ CPUs are the last server products to use AMD’s SP3 socket platform. Milan’s successor codenamed Genoa will use the SP5 platform and will bring in the Zen 4 microarchitecture, DDR5 memory, and PCIe Gen 5 interconnections. 4th Generation AMD EPYC processors will be fabbed using TSMC’s 5nm process technology.
“We are on track or we expect to start shipping Milan here late this year,” said Su. “Then we are also working in development on Zen 4 which is slated for 5nm.”
Sources: AMD, SeekingAlpha
