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Epyc-Feature

At its Financial Annotator Day on Th, AMD fabricated a number of announcements about its upcoming product launches and where it will focus in 2017. The company has historically used these events to forecast its functioning over the next few years and is riding high subsequently the successful launch of Ryzen vii and Ryzen 5. Investors, all the same, have been jittery well-nigh the manufacturer'due south stock operation so far this year and AMD was likewise looking to calm the waters every bit it rolls out new hardware.

Nosotros've known the codename for AMD'south Ryzen server CPUs, Naples, simply the visitor unveiled the actual make name today. Henceforth, AMD's server CPUs volition be sold under the Epyc make. It's pronounced similar the ordinary word, and every bit brand names become…maybe information technology'll grow on people? That's pretty much the all-time we've got right now. Opteron was a stronger product name in our personal opinion, but ultimately, customers aren't going to intendance what it'due south called, they'll intendance how it performs.

One point AMD made from the outset of the event is that information technology focused on information centers when it brought Zen to market. We haven't seen much in the way of server benchmarks on the core withal, simply Ryzen five and 7 have been at their strongest when competing against Intel in workstation workloads similar video editing and 3D rendering. Server workloads tend to be their own unique animal, only AMD enjoyed tremendous success with Opteron when it aimed Athlon 64 at the data center get-go, consumer workloads second. It'southward not surprising to come across company doubling downwardly on this strategy once more.

Diving into data centers

AMD's statement for its own reentry into the data heart acknowledges that the company's marketplace share is effectively 0 percent today. The company'southward position is that while it's been driven out of the market place in contempo years, it has previously established its chops as a provider of server solutions from single-socket bract servers to multi-socket systems.

Epyc-Volume

The company's Epyc processors volition offer up to 32 cores with 128 lanes of PCI Express iii.0 connectivity and eight retentiveness channels. This combination of massive memory bandwidth and core counts could give AMD a leg up on Intel in three cardinal areas. First, AMD can offer an enormous amount of retention bandwidth on a single-socket system with all viii of its memory channels. Intel, in contrast, is limited to merely four channels. Granted, Intel's memory controller efficiency might prove to exist higher than AMD'south, but eight channels is hard to fence with, particularly in a 1-socket system, and the two-socket comparison is pretty strongly tilted for AMD.

Second, AMD is purposefully eschewing Intel's habit of locking off sure capabilities to specific SKUs. Intel's Xeon lines are subdivided by capability — some SKUs are for single-socket systems, some support two sockets, some range upward to 4 sockets. AMD is simply declaring that all versions of all Epyc fries volition have the aforementioned I/O, the same memory channels, and the same capabilities.

Two-SocketAMD

Third, AMD wants to position Epyc as an ideal friction match for car learning and bogus intelligence workloads. To that end, it'south congenital a single-socket CPU with enough I/O connectivity to handle multiple Radeon Instinct cards. AMD noted that in other servers, customers are required to buy multi-socket systems merely to have enough connectivity to run a total complement of GPUs in them, as shown higher up. The 128 lanes of PCI Express connectivity that Epyc offers, in contrast, can drive half dozen cards (16 lanes each) from one socket, with 32 lanes of PCI Limited three.0 left over for intra-fleck advice.

One point of clarification hither: Dissimilar Intel, which offers xl PCI Express 3.0 lanes in a single socket and 80 lanes in a dual socket, AMD offers 128 lanes in both a 1S and 2S configuration. In the ii-socket system, 64 lanes of PCIe 3.0 are defended to intra-chip communication, with each CPU offering 64 lanes of chipset I/O.

InstinctEpyc

Information technology'due south going to take time for AMD to build whatsoever kind of market share in server, where information technology's basically starting from scratch, but the company seemed bullish on the prospects for its CPU architecture and where Zen will take information technology in the information center space. But the visitor appears determined to retake share in a marketplace where its 1S and 2S platforms are going to compare quite well confronting what Intel is fielding. If Naples is as strong in server workloads equally Ryzen has been in workstation and desktop work, Intel could have a serious fight on its hands. AMD's new platform could too win fans from companies building deep learning and AI platforms that want to field the maximum number of cards per socket without paying a premium for multi-socket solutions.