AMD has unveiled the third generation of its EPYC server processors, based on the company’s Zen 3 microarchitecture.
Codenamed AMD EPYC Milan, the new CPU range is up to twice as fast as the nearest competition across high performance computing (HPC), cloud and enterprise workloads.
The most performant SKU in the range (the 64-core EPYC 7763) also takes the crown of “world’s highest-performing server processor”, says the firm, delivering up to 19% more instructions per clock courtesy of the new architecture.
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During a briefing session, TechRadar Pro was told that the greater performance density on offer with EPYC Milan means customers can achieve the same level of performance with 49% fewer servers and 25% fewer racks, as compared with Intel’s best.
This also means less space and power is required to house, run and cool servers, which AMD claims translates to a 35% saving on total cost of ownership (TCO).
The main caveat is that the figures are based on comparisons with Intel’s Xeon Gold 6258R, not the soon-to-be released Intel Ice Lake Xeon CPUs, which will be much more competitive.
AMD EPYC Milan
AMD has launched 19 new EPYC CPUs in total, ranging from 8 to 64 cores per processor and costing between $913 and $7,890 per thousand units.
The company hopes this level of breadth will mean EPYC Milan offers something for everyone, without forcing customers into purchasing more powerful (and expensive) CPUs than suit their needs.
AMD is also keen to emphasize the security credentials of the new EPYC range. The third generation CPUs offer both shadow stack and secure encrypted virtualization (SEV) with secure nested paging (SNP), which build upon existing protections to better shield against control flow attacks and untrusted hypervisors.
“SEV-SNP expands the existing SEV features on EPYC processors, adding strong memory integrity protection capabilities to help prevent malicious hypervisor-based attacks by creating an isolated execution environment,” said AMD.
According to the company, the combination of improved security, superior performance and a deeper range of options will allow EPYC Milan to deliver “dramatic value” to customers of all kinds.
Dell Technologies has announced it will deploy EPYC Milan in its PowerEdge XE8545 server and the same can be said of HPE, which will use the new CPUs in its ProLiant servers, Apollo systems and Cray EX supercomputers.
The largest players in the cloud computing market will also utilize the new range, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud unveiling EPYC Milan-powered VMs and AWS set to add third generation EPYC processors to its EC2 instance families later in the year.
All AMD EPYC Milan CPUs are available for purchase immediately.
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