AMD launches new series of Epyc processors for the enterprise
AMD on Tuesday announced a new series of Epyc processors, high-frequency chips designed for enterprise workloads. The new 7Fx2 series, which includes 8-core, 16-core and 24-core chips, specifically targets database, commercial high-performance computing (HPC) and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) workloads.
By combining the AMD Infinity architecture with higher-speed Zen 2 cores, the new chips offer the highest per-core performance in the Epyc family.
AMD re-entered the data center market in 2017 with its Epyc server processors. The second-gen Epyc processors continue to gain traction in the enterprise, cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) markets, AMD leaders said in March at the company's Financial Analyst Day.
"The enterprise is an important area for us," Dan McNamara, SVP and GM of AMD's server business unit, told reporters. "We're really going after that with this new launch, with the per-core advantage and per-CPU dollar advantage."
The enterprise will continue to be a robust market, McNamara said, given the modernization phase happening with the rise of 5G, as well as planned upgrades around Windows Server and vSphere.
AMD, he said, is focused on a few key enterprise objectives. That includes helping enterprises gather intelligence from their data more quickly, as well as helping them run commercial HPC applications. It also includes facilitating the convergence of compute, storage and network -- "much like hyperscalers today, but at the smaller, enterprise level," McNamara said. "We believe the same value proposition that's helping us to win in the cloud will help us win with HCI."
The new 8-core and 16-core chips demonstrate up to 17 percent more transactions per minute with SQL Server compared to the competition, AMD says. Additionally, the company says, they offer a VMmark 3.1 score up to 47 percent higher when compared with the competition, as well as application performance up to 94 percent higher per core in computational fluid dynamics.
The new processors are supported by a range of partners, including Dell EMC, HPE, Lenovo and Nutanix. Supermicro is launching the industry's first blade platform built for Epyc processors with support for the new chips. Meanwhile, IBM Cloud is launching a new bare metal server offering based on the 7F72 processors.