AMD launches its Epyc server chip to take on Intel in the data center - romanthiche

It's non just the folks at AMD WHO Bob Hope that that the company's Epyc server processor, officially launched Tuesday, will break Intel's stranglehold on the data-center chip market.

Endeavor users, web hosting companies and hyperscale cloud providers all want competition and choice in server chips to curb costs and fuel innovation.

"OEMs have been looking an unconventional to Intel for a long time, and with Intel having 98 percent commercialise share I can tell that there's absolutely a need, from the OEM repoint of catch and the channel stand," said Patrick Moorhead, principal at Moor Insights & Scheme.

Judgement from glasses, performance benchmarks and memory features likewise as the supporting voices from software and hardware makers in the data meat ecosystem, Epyc has the best shot of any chip to hit the grocery store in years at putting a crack in Intel's dominance.

"For AMD to penetrate the securities industry, gain ground hearts and minds, to make up value that customers are willing to pay for, we have to be disruptive," said Dan Bounds, senior director of data center products and enterprise solutions at AMD. "To come in and have a production that looks and smells like the competition very isn't useful."

Though AMD has been teasing Epyc's features for some clock time, and leaks of spec sheets have been circulating this past week, Tuesday's launch is the first official public unveiling of details for the whole product stack.

The bottom rung features the Epyc 7251, which offers eight cores supporting 16 simultaneous threads, and a base frequency of 2.1GHz that tops out at 2.9GHz at maximum rise. The top of the line Epyc 7601 has a whopping 32 cores, 64 threads and a base frequency of 2.2GHz, with maximum boost at 3.2GHz. Intel's Xeon chips, meanwhile, have up to 24 cores.

epyc range — AMD's Epyc processor family ranges from eight cores to 32 cores.

Arsenic more and more data moves to the swarm, data center servers are put increasingly under stress. Adding cores to processors will help oneself servers oppose quickly, for example, to search requests as well arsenic recognize images and process video faster.

But the Epyc narrative doesn't stop at the keep down of cores the CPU offers. All the processors, up and down the product range, offer eight memory channels load-bearing up to 2666MHz DDR4 Drachm, 2TB of memory and 128 PCIe lanes. TDP (thermal design power), the level bes amount of money of heat expected to be generated by a chip, ranges from 120W at the low end of the chain capable 180W for the monster 32-core modelling.

To top information technology soured, all of this is offered in a single-socket chip, which can be paired with some other Epyc chip in a two-socket system.

At the high end, in more or less the $4,000 range, AMD internal benchmarks show the Epyc 7601 bingle-socket package offering 75 percent higher floating sharpen performance (for spreadsheets, graphics and games, e.g.) and 47 percent higher integer processing performance (for whole-number and school tex processing, for illustration) than Intel's E5-2699A v4. Interestingly, AMD benchmarks show 70 percent higher integer performance over Intel in the middle-grade, $800 price point level, with the Epyc 7301 facing off against the Intel E5-7630.

At the Tuesday unveiling, AMD has a variety of partners doing demos to back all of this up. Pricing is important, but it's the entirety of the SoC (system along a chip) that gives AMD a beachhead in the data center.

"What makes it so attractive is that it's non just AMD selling something for less," said Moorhead. "It's that a single socket server with complete of the bandwidth and cores that are available will give up people to make smaller servers so you privy have a higher tightness, and density is key particularly with the hyperscalers or even people in hosting."

Essentially, Epyc allows information centers to ready more servers into a smaller space, saving power, space, and operating costs. The greater the scale, the greater the savings.

AMD's Epyc one-socket processor chip — AMD's Epyc processor is available in one-socket and two-socket models.

AMD says it's the balance of execution and scalable memory that is its big discriminator. "The floating point performance we trust gets us a seat at the table and allows United States of America then to unpack our memory bandwidth story and our memory performance," said AMD's Bounds.

Having the same memory potentiality and the same I/O footprint crosswise the product set out, from the 8-core version to the 32-core version, is key, Bounds said. "It's a massive, massive differentiator and disruptor over Broadwell and will continue to be so terminated Skylake," he same, referring to Intel's occurrent and adjacent-generation Xeon architecture, unsurprising to be formally launched in July.

While Skylake will offer a performance hike ended Broadwell, the expected 15 per centum boost will non be enough to make up the gap with Epyc, especially in the single-socket package, piece the remembering scalability wish also help AMD's new chip to stop competive, Moorhead agreed.

Epyc will be socket-compatible with the next generation of the product family, and IT also has a dedicated security department subsystem, where AMD is burning cryptographic functions into the silicon of the memory controllers, efficaciously encrypting retentivity, Moorhead famed.

This is AMD's third big try in the server market; IT has had enough success and failure to say it knows what it takes to be successful.

When it came out with the Opteron Dual Core processor in 2005, offering a twofold single-socket carrying out advantage finished Xeon, it grabbed 20 percent of the market within two eld. But a a couple of years later, bugs and postponements in the launch of its Barcelona cut off architecture allowed Intel to recapture lost ground.

Then, AMD moved away from X86 architecture and embraced Fortify, merely Intel made technical advancements such As increasing business leader efficiency, reducing advantages that ARM offered. Several makers of Limb-based chips sustain gone outer of business and aside the clip AMD free ARM-settled servers, there was little interest.

At the March summit for the Facebook-founded Open Compute Project (OCP), Microsoft said information technology was working with Cavium and Qualcomm to embrace Limb as part of its Project Olympus next-generation standard system architecture for cloud computation, but that alone is promising not sufficiency to bring about de facto deployments of Weapon system host chips anytime soon.

Meanwhile, also at the acme, AMD announced that it too was workings with Microsoft to incorporate Epyc into Project Olympus. Unequal ARM chips, Epyc, which incorporates the X86-based "Zen" architecture of its recently launched Ryzen Threadripper processors for PCs, does not command package makers to rewrite code already tuned to x86.

A big theatrical role of AMD's Epyc rollout involves highlighting support it's getting from the industry, including declarations from HPE, Lenovo, Dell-EMC, Asus and Gigabyte. On the software program go with, Microsoft, Red Hat, VMWare, Xen, Suse and Citrix have qualified or are in the process of certifying applications and databases for Epyc.

At last, though, the proof that Epyc crapper make a dent in the market will come when the ironware makers come out with Epyc-settled systems, and users deploy them. Some Epyc servers are anticipated extinct in the next few quarters, with ramp-dormie of production extending into 2018. Likely, cloud providers and hosters will be among the first users.