UPDATED 19:53 EDT / APRIL 01 2020

INFRA

AMD’s 2nd Gen EPYC processor chips to power IBM’s cloud servers

Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is expanding its presence in the cloud computing market, teaming up with IBM Corp. to make its latest central processing units available on IBM Cloud’s bare-metal servers.

The announcement is yet another milestone for AMD, which has in the last year has managed to break rival chipmaker Intel Corp.’s stranglehold on the cloud computing market. AMD’s chips are now available in servers used by Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and other cloud service providers.

The company’s 2nd Gen AMD EPYC 7642 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 chipmaking process and feature up to 64 “Zen 2” cores. AMD said that helps them to deliver record-breaking performance while also reducing the total cost of ownership by up to 50% across many common data center workloads.

The EPYC chips, based on AMD’s x86-based Zen architecture, and more than 140 performance records, according to the company. The current version of the chip, codenamed Rome, was launched last August.

AMD said the chips are available on IBM bare metal servers in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions, and can be ordered via the IBM Cloud global catalog portal.

“AMD and IBM Cloud are now working together to enable the best IBM Cloud Bare Metal experience for clients whose workloads demand high core count and throughput in a two-socket system,” said Satinder Sethi, general manager of IBM Cloud Infrastructure Services. “The 2nd Gen AMD EPYC family of processors provides IBM Cloud access to large core scaling, increased memory bandwidth and some of the highest CPU performance possible for a variety of workloads — from bare metal to database, containers and HPC.”

Analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy told SiliconANGLE the partnership should help AMD expand its presence in a cloud market that has become much more of a priority for chipmakers in recent years thanks to declining sales of personal computers. AMD is helped by the fact that Intel has struggled to perfect its own seven-nanometer chipmaking process and probably won’t be able to ship its first products until next year at the earliest.

“AMD has been picking up wins at all of the major cloud service providers and IBM was one of the last two sign up,” Moorhead said. “I’m not surprised given EPYC’s strong cloud instance value proposition.”

IBM is currently ranked fourth overall in the global cloud computing market with a 6% market share, according to a report from Synergy Research Group last month. AWS retains the top spot with a 33% market share, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Image: AMD

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