AMD EPYC server chips arrive

Yesterday evening AMD launched EPYC, a new platform that aims to capture a lot of marketshare from Intel in the server market. The flagship is the EPYC 7601, a 32-core, 64-threaded beast with up to 3.2GHz Precision Boost, 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes and eight-channel DDR4-2666 memory support. AMD claims the EPYC 7601 offers up to 41 percent higher performance than Intel's Xeon E5-2699A v4.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD), and a global ecosystem of server partners, today marked a new era in the datacenter with the launch of AMD EPYC™ 7000 series high-performance datacenter processors. AMD was joined by multiple customers and partners at the global launch event in presenting a wide array of systems, performance demonstrations, and customer testimonials. The innovative, record-setting AMD EPYC design, with up to 32 high-performance “Zen” cores and an unparalleled feature set, delivers greater performance than the competition across a full range of integer, floating point, memory bandwidth, and I/O benchmarks and workloads.

“With our EPYC family of processors, AMD is delivering industry-leading performance on critical enterprise, cloud, and machine intelligence workloads,” said Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. “EPYC processors offer uncompromising performance for single-socket systems while scaling dual-socket server performance to new heights, outperforming the competition at every price point. We are proud to bring choice and innovation back to the datacenter with the strong support of our global ecosystem partners.”

The world’s largest server manufacturers introduced products based on AMD EPYC 7000-series processors at today’s launch, including HPE, Dell, Asus, Gigabyte, Inventec, Lenovo, Sugon, Supermicro, Tyan, and Wistron. Primary hypervisor and server operating system providers Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware showcased optimized support for EPYC, while key server hardware ecosystem partners Mellanox, Samsung Electronics, and Xilinx were also featured in EPYC-optimized platforms.

For an in-depth look at what's new, check out this article from AnandTech.

EPYC specifications:

Model	Core / Thread	Base Freq.	Max Boost	TDP
EPYC™ 7601	32 / 64	2.2 GHz	3.2 GHz	180W
EPYC™ 7551P	32 / 64	2.0 GHz	3.0 GHz	180W
EPYC™ 7501	32 / 64	2.0 GHz	3.0 GHz	155/170W
EPYC™ 7451	24 / 48	2.3 GHz	3.2 GHz	180W
EPYC™ 7401P	24 / 48	2.0 GHz	3.0 GHz	155/170W
EPYC™ 7351P	16 / 32	2.4 GHz	2.9 GHz	155/170W
EPYC™ 7301	16 / 32	2.2 GHz	2.7 GHz	155/170W
EPYC™ 7281	16 / 32	2.1 GHz	2.7 GHz	155/170W
EPYC™ 7251	8 / 16	2.1 GHz	2.9 GHz	120W