Lenovo and HPE release servers based on AMD's 2nd gen Epyc chip

Since AMD's launch of its second generation processor chip for data centres on Wednesday, known as the Epyc Rome chip, the company has announced agreements with tech giants like Lenovo, Google, Twitter, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Lenovo released two new single-socket servers based on the Epyc Rome chips, the ThinkSystem SR635 and SR655, that will be used for video infrastructure, virtualisation, and software-defined storage. 

The ThinkSystem SR635 is a 1U server with 16 DDR4 DIMMs that can support up to 1TB of memory using 64 GB RDIMMs, three single-wide GPUs and three PCIe Gen4 slots, one OCP mezzanine slot, and capacity for up to 16 2.5-inch NVMe drives.

The ThinkSystem SR655 is a larger 2U machine featuring 16 DDR4 memory slots for 1TB of DRAM, 6 single-wide GPUs, an OCP mezzanine slot, and supports either 20 3.5-inch or 32 2.5-inch NVMe storage drives.  

"The greater storage, processing, and graphics capabilities unlock the potential of enhanced video security and other critical applications for edge and virtualised environments," Doug Fisher, COO and senior vice president of Lenovo's DCG Solutions said. 

"A perfect example is video security in smart city, campus, and mass transit environments where public safety organisations need that additional computing power in confined spaces." 

The Epyc Rome chip is the world's first 7nm server processor. It features eight to 64 Zen 2 cores, combining up to eight 7nm chiplets with a 14nm I/O die, offers twice the performance per socket, and about 4X peak theoretical FLOPS compared to the previous generation of Epyc chips.

See also: AMD's Q3 outlook lighter than expected as Q2 earnings on target  

HPE, meanwhile, announced it has tripled its AMD-based portfolio following the launch of the Epyc Rome chip, and has updated its HPE ProLiant DL385 and HPE ProLiant DL325 servers to use the new processor chip.

"With the addition of new 2nd Gen AMD EPYC-equipped servers to our portfolio, HPE delivers an unprecedented number of world-record performance and efficiency results aligned to a wide range of cloud and data centre workloads, and unmatched security capabilities," HPE senior vice president and general manager of Volume Global Business Justin Hotard said.

In testing the updated servers, they beat previous virtualisation performance records by as much as 321% and power efficiency records by 28%, HPE said.

Meanwhile, AMD signed on Google and Twitter as new clients that will use its Rome chip for their data centre infrastructure. Google announced at the launch that it will use the Epyc Rome chips for its internal infrastructure production data centre environment and also offer new general-purpose machines powered by the processors to external developers as part of its cloud computing offerings later this year.

Twitter will also use the Epyc Rome chips across its data centre infrastructure later this year.

With the launch of the second generation Epyc chip, Scott Aylor, general manager of AMD's Datacenter Solutions Group, expects the company to take a bigger slice of market share than previously, stating that it represents an inflection point for the industry. 

"Epyc second-generation is really setting a new standard for the data centre," he said. 

The company gained single-digit market share with the 1st Gen Epyc, and expects to gain double-digit market share over the next four to six quarters. 

AMD currently has over 60 partners signed up for the second generation Epyc chip.

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