UPDATED 21:40 EDT / AUGUST 07 2019

INFRA

AMD announces next-generation EPYC data center chips and big customer wins

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today announced the launch of its second generation of EPYC processing chips for data centers, adding some new big-name customers including Google LLC and Twitter Inc.

The company’s 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors are built using new technology from contract manufacturers that delivers better performance while using less power than its previous-generation chips. The chips are built on a cutting-edge seven-nanometer process and feature up to 64 “Zen 2” cores, which help them to deliver record-breaking performance while also reducing the total cost of ownership by up to 50% across many common data center workloads, AMD said.

“Today, we set a new standard for the modern data center,” Lisa Su, AMD’s president and chief executive officer, said during her keynote at the launch event. “Adoption of our new leadership server processors is accelerating with multiple new enterprise, cloud and HPC customers choosing EPYC processors to meet their most demanding server computing needs.”

AMD executives spent much of their time discussing the performance improvements of the second generation EPYC chips. For example, they claimed the chips deliver an 83% performance improvement in Java application workloads. They also boasted of the chips’ “world record virtualization performance” and a “record-setting floating-point performance” in high-performance computing workloads.

The new processors deliver up to 23% more instructions per clock per core on server workloads and up to four times more L3 Cache than the previous generation, officials added.

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Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said the launch of the new chips was a big step forward for the company, far bigger than he expected.

“AMD improved most of its Gen 1 shortcomings like single-thread performance and core scaling, and added new RAS and security capabilities in addition to substantial, multicore performance gains,” Moorhead said.

AMD’s main rival in the data center chip space is Intel Corp. In recent years, both companies have given more priority to these chips, which are mostly used to power internet-based services, as PC sales have declined.

Moorhead said he fully expects AMD to gain ground on Intel with the launch of its second-generation EPYC chips, after making some minimal gains with the launch of its predecessor.

“AMD gained low, single-digit share with the 1st Gen EPYC, but I expect the company to gain more share with 2nd Gen EPYC among cloud service providers, enterprises and high-performance computing,” the analyst said. “Enterprises don’t mass-deploy any first-generation product. They didn’t deploy 1st Gen EPYC, but they will deploy the 2nd Gen EPYC.”

AMD can take advantage of the fact that Intel, which builds its chips in its own factories rather than relying on contractors, has fallen behind schedule with its own seven-nanometer manufacturing process. Those chips aren’t expected to arrive until 2021 at the earliest.

That delay is thought to be one of the reasons why AMD has been able to court some of Intel’s biggest customers, including Google.

At the event, Google executives appeared on stage to say the company has already deployed AMD’s 2nd Gen EPYC processors to handle specific workloads within some of its cloud data centers. Later this year, the company will also use the chips to power new “general-purpose” machines for its Google Cloud Compute Engine service.

“Google is an interesting customer that has exhibited that it’s willing to go big if it sees better performance and price,” Moorhead said. “Google was AMD’s largest Opteron customer back in the day. I will be keeping my eye on this one.”

AMD also scooped up Twitter as another marquee customer. The social media company said it will deploy AMD’s new chips across its data centers later this year in a move that it expects will reduce its total cost of ownership by 25%.

Microsoft Corp. also came on stage to announce a preview of new Azure virtual machines for general-purpose applications based on the new chips. In addition, the company announced limited previews of cloud-based remote desktops and high-performance computing workloads based on the new architecture.

Data center hardware providers Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd. announced new platforms powered by the new chips as well. They include HPE’s new ProLiant DL385 and ProLiant DL325 servers and Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SR655 and SR635 servers.

Photo: AMD/Twitter

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