AMD CEO Lisa Su: Genoa 4th Generation EPYC Deployment ‘Provides Leadership’ for Data Center | CRN

November 10, 2022, 02:30 PM EST

The company’s latest high-powered computer chips aimed at the data center pull directly on the arc of rival Intel Corp., which has dominated the x86 data center space but has lost ground to AMD in recent times. years. “AMD has finally achieved its goal of becoming a true data center provider,” a channel partner told CRN.

AMD officially launched the highly anticipated fourth-generation EPYC processors for high-performance computing (HPC) in the data center on Thursday.

The new EPYC Genoa processors promise to bring AMD’s highest performance core ever to the data center, while increasing power efficiency for mission-critical workloads for cloud, enterprise and HPC needs, a said the company.

The company said that with 96 cores, the new processors will support performance and efficiency and help secure data with multiple layers of physical and virtual protection with twice as many encryption keys compared to previous generations. Based on a 5 nanometer manufacturing process, the processors will run on the latest Zen 4 computing architecture.

“Choosing the right data center processor is more important than ever,” AMD CEO and President Lisa Su said at Thursday’s EPYC launch event. “I am proud to say that the 4th Generation EPYC provides leadership in all dimensions. It’s the best performer, it’s the most efficient, and we deliver significantly better performance per watt than our competitors. And what that means for the business and for cloud data centers…it translates to lower (capital expenditure), lower (operating expenditure), and lower total cost of ownership, while including all the performances we talked about.

Tom Morton, senior HPC account manager at Burnsville, Minn.-based Nor-Tech, said his company is seeing significant gains in the data center with the AMD product, pointing to the recent $1 million contract. of Nor-Tech to supply AMD’s third-generation EPYC Milano processors. for the California Institute of Technology Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. “AMD has finally achieved its goal of becoming a true data center vendor,” Morton said. “As a service, Nor-Tech provides a testbed of the latest Intel and AMD processors and Nvidia and AMD GPUs for its customers to test their code on the latest hardware to compare and contrast results reference. In this case, the EPYC provided Caltech with the best performance per dollar. »

And with the latest release of fourth-generation EPYC, Morton expects demand to continue and competition between AMD and Intel to intensify further. “With Genoa (the codename for EPYC 4th Gen), AMD will take another step to further widen the price/performance gap over Intel,” Morton said. “In 2023, when Intel releases Sapphire Rapids, it will also take a step forward in terms of cores and performance. It is end users and researchers who will benefit from this kind of healthy competition and choice.

Intel’s next-generation HPC product – the Sapphire Rapids processor – has suffered numerous delays and is now expected to launch in January. AMD’s fourth-generation launch includes 18 products under the EPYC umbrella, ranging from 16-core to 96-core with speeds up to 4.4GHz. The new products also support DDR5 and PCIe Gen 5 memory for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications – some of the first chips to achieve this compatibility.

“We’ve built the best data center processor roadmap in the industry, and with the 4th Gen EPYC, we’re delivering another major leap in performance and efficiency to make the best processor roadmap even better server performance,” Su said. “With a significantly expanded set of solutions being launched from our partner ecosystem, customers who choose EPYC Gen4 to power their data centers can improve performance, consolidate their infrastructure and reduce energy costs.”

AMD recently announced third-quarter earnings showing slower PC sales reducing its bottom line with net profit down 93% to $66 million and a year-over-year operating loss of 64 million. millions of dollars. But the data center business remained strong, growing 45% year-over-year to $1.6 billion in revenue, driven by EPYC sales.

“We are confident that our industry-leading product portfolio, strong balance sheet and continued growth opportunities in our data center and integrated businesses position us well to navigate the current market dynamics,” Su told investors during of a call for results.