Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s latest attempt to establish a serious presence in the Intel Corp.-dominated server market is looking to be one of the most promising yet.

At a Tuesday event in Austin, Texas, AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su (pictured) introduced a new processor family called Epyc that targets data centers where a premium is placed on performance.

AMD claims that the series beats Intel’s Xeon server chips on speed in multiple price ranges. The most affordable model, the 8-core Epyc 7251, is up to 23 percent faster than the closest low-end Xeon, while the top-end Epyc 7601 packs 32 cores that can provide as much as 47 percent more horsepower than Intel’s similarly priced alternative.

The latter model has the added advantage of being cheaper than its Xeon counterpart, which brings to focus another area where AMD has always tried to one-up Intel: price. To that end, the company has equipped the single-socket chips in the Epyc family with the same number of PCIe lanes and memory channels as the faster two-socket models. The goal is to remove the need for customers to buy expensive two-socket processors just because they require the extra throughput.

In the same spirit, AMD has made the advanced software features from the high-end Epyc chips available on the cheaper models. One of the most notable capabilities is an encryption engine designed to protect against hardware tampering. According to the chip maker, the processors can scramble records as they’re written to memory so that hackers can’t read them even if they gain physical access to the host server.

The encryption engine is joined by new configuration options designed to streamline data center operations. Epyc-powered servers will offer the ability to cap energy consumption at a certain level or, if the main priority is performance, have the chip draw extra electricity to provide a speed boost.

This feature set is already starting to attract the attention of data center suppliers. One of the first adopters is Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., which plans to include Epyc chips in several upcoming servers. Lenovo Group Ltd. and a number of other manufacturers plan to use the processor series as well.

“It’s been about a decade since anyone made a dent in Intel’s dominance of the datacenter,” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “EPYC has a very compelling value proposition, particularly with their one-socket solution.”

The “Who’s Who” of server and cloud companies at the launch event, such as HPE, Dell EMC, Baidu Inc. and Microsoft’s Azure cloud operation also represented a meaningful vote of confidence, Moorhead said. “What’s different versus other alternatives is that I see commitments to deploy, not just tire-kicking, and that’s important.”

The Epyc family received an equally warm reception on Wall Street. AMD’s stock is up today about 9 percent in a sign that investors believe it may finally loosen Intel’s grip on the lucrative server market.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: AMD