Cisco unveils AMD EPYC-powered servers

Cisco expands its USC server line up to include AMD 7000-series EPYC processors.

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The new offerings come in the form of the Cisco UCS C4200 Series Rack Server Chassis and Cisco UCS C125 M5 Rack Server Node.

The C4200 Rack Server Chassis can hold up to four rack server nodes in two rack units (2RU) with shared N+1 redundant power and cooling, and house up to 24 small form factor drives, with the UCS C125 M5 Rack Server Node supporting up to two EPYC 7000-series processors, each with with up to 32 cores per chip, up to 2 TB of RAM, twin PCIe 3.0 slots, along with space for an optional 4th-generation Cisco UCS virtual interface card.

The C4200 is focused on offering a modular platform optimized for compute density, and deliver the following key advantages:

• Up to 128 percent higher processor core density compared to existing two-socket UCS M5 rack servers
• 50 percent more servers and 20 percent more storage per rack
• 33 percent more memory bandwidth compared to existing UCS M5 rack servers
• No new fabric and management silos for high-density computing vs. general purpose computing
• Systems management from the cloud, with Intersight

As the weeks pass, AMD's EPYC platform seems to be gaining more and more momentum. In December of 2017 Baidu, the Chinese internet search provider and leader in artificial intelligence, announced the availability of AMD EPYC-powered AI, big data, and cloud computing (ABC) services.

The same month saw Microsoft become the first global cloud provider to use EPYC processors in its datacenters, while in November the new EPYC-powered Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) ProLiant DL385 Gen10 server set new world records for both SPECrate 2017_fp_base and SPECfp_rate2006 benchmarks.

Earlier this year Dell EMC unveiled a line of single-and dual-socket EPYC-powered PowerEdge servers, which offered 20 percent lower total cost of ownership and 25 percent more HPC performance. This was later followed by the announcement that Yahoo Japan would become the first Japanese ISP to deploy single-socket EPYC-powered PowerEdge servers.

Cisco UCS C4200 Series Rack Server Chassis and C125 Server Nodes with AMD EPYC processors are expected to ship during Q3 of 2018.

AMD's EPYC: Everything you need to know

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