Tuesday, March 16, 2021

AMD sees wide partner support for new EPYC server chips

AMD unveiled its EPYC 7003 Series CPUs, claiming the highest performance benchmark for a server processor with up to 19% more instructions per clock. 

The AMD EPYC 7003 Series Processors have up to 64 “Zen 3” cores per processor and introduce new levels of per-core cache memory, while continuing to offer the PCIe 4 connectivity and class-leading memory bandwidth. 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors also include modern security features through AMD Infinity Guard, supporting a new feature called Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP). SEV-SNP expands the existing SEV features on EPYC processors, adding strong memory integrity protection capabilities to help prevent malicious hypervisor-based attacks by creating an isolated execution environment. 

“With the launch of our 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, we are incredibly excited to deliver the fastest server CPU in the world. These processors extend our data center leadership and help customers solve today’s most complex IT challenges, while substantially growing our ecosystem,” said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group. “We not only double the performance over the competition in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads with our newest server CPUs, but together with the AMD Instinct GPUs, we are breaking the exascale barrier in supercomputing and helping to tackle problems that have previously been beyond humanity’s reach.”

AMD also cited broad industry support, including:

  • AWS – will add the AMD EPYC 7003 series processors to its core Amazon EC2 instance families later this year.
  • Cisco – introduced new Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) rack server models with AMD EPYC 7003 Series Processors designed to support modern hybrid cloud workloads.   
  • Dell Technologies – announced the all new PowerEdge XE8545 server with AMD EPYC 7003 series CPUs, and the company will support the new processors within its PowerEdge server portfolio.
  • Google Cloud – announced AMD EPYC 7003 series processors will power a new compute optimized VM, C2D, and an expansion of the existing general purpose N2D VM later this year. Google Cloud Confidential Computing will be available on both C2D and N2D.
  • HPE – announced it will double the lineup of AMD EPYC processor powered solutions, using the AMD EPYC 7003 series processors in new HPE ProLiant servers, HPE Apollo systems and HPE Cray EX supercomputers.
  • Lenovo – added ten Lenovo ThinkSystem Servers and ThinkAgile HCI solutions built on 3rd Gen EPYC processors, and achieved more than 25 new world records across a broad set of industry-standard benchmarks in workload areas.
  • Microsoft Azure  – announced multiple new virtual machine offerings powered by AMD EPYC 7003 series processors. Azure HBv3 virtual machines for HPC applications are generally available today, and Confidential Computing virtual machines that utilize the full security features of the new AMD EPYC 7003 series processors are in private preview.
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – announced it is extending its flexible virtual machine and bare metal compute offerings with the new E4 platform based on 3rd Generation AMD EPYC Processors.
  • Supermicro – introduced the AMD EPYC 7003 series processor in its Supermicro A+ single and dual socket family of Ultra, Twin, SuperBlade, Storage and GPU Optimized Systems.
  • Tencent Cloud – announced the new Tencent Cloud SA3 server instance, powered by the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors.  
  • VMware – announced its latest release of VMware vSphere 7 which is optimized to take advantage of AMD EPYC processors virtualization performance, while supporting the processors’ advanced security features, including SEV-ES for both virtual machine based and containerized applications.