AMD is charging back into the enterprise datacenter and select HPC workflows with its new EPYC 7000 processor line, code-named Naples, announced today at a “global” launch event in Austin TX. In many ways it was a full frontal assault on Intel’s dominance in the x86 datacenter landscape. Claiming performance and cost advantagaes and supported by statements from key OEMs, ODMs, and hyperscalers – HPE, Dell, and Microsoft Azure for example – AMD is hoping to convince HPC and datacenter customers it is back for the long haul.

Aware there may be market reluctance after its absence from the datacenter, Scott Aylor, AMD corporate VP and GM of enterprise solutions business, said “It’s not enough to come back with one product, you’ve got to come back with a product cadence that moves as the market moves. So not only are we coming back with EPYC, we’re also [discussing follow-on products] so when customers move with us today on EPYC they know they have a safe home and a migration path with Rome.” AMD has committed to socket compatibility between EPYC 7000 line and Rome, code name of the next scheduled generation AMD processor aimed at the datacenter.

AMD showcased some gaudy performance and price-performance benchmarks comparing EPYC to Broadwell line. In a pre-launch briefing with HPCwire, Aylor said, “These numbers are very big, so they show very measurable separation from what is available with Broadwell. Part of that is quite frankly because we didn’t design EPYC to compete with Broadwell. We designed it to compete with what’s coming. When [Intel’s] Skylake comes later this summer, we think these comparisons will still be very strong against the platinum, gold silver and bronze of Skylake.”

Based on the Zen core, EPYC is a line of system on a chip (SoC) devices designed with enhanced memory bandwidth and fast interconnect in mind. AMD also introduced a one-socket device, optimized for many workloads, which AMD says will invigorate a viable one-socket server market. With EPYC, “we can build a no compromise one-socket offering that will allow us to cover up to 50 percent of the two-socket market that is today held by the [Intel Broadwell] E5-2650 and below,” said Aylor.

AMD clearly has big ambitions. Earlier this spring it introduced Ryzen7 processor line, also based on the Zen core, and targeting high performance gaming. EPYC is aimed squarely at the datacenter. Aylor briefed HPCwire on EPYC before the launch and some of the technical details were still not available. It is an SoC product stack with a range of offerings roughly mimicking the Broadwell product stack. EPYC has up to 32 cores and 8 DDR4 channels per CPU allowing it to address 2TB of memory. The I/O is 128 PCIe lanes.

“The SoC approach we have taken allows all of the IO that has historically lived on an external bridge or IO hub to be fully integrated that into the device,” said Aylor. One result is low latency high performance connections. The PCIe lanes are configurable, “so you can use them to connect to SATA links, directly connect to NVMe links. It also facilitates a strong connection to high performance GPUs.” AMD plans to show an EPYC plus Radeon Instinct GPU machine learning platform at its conference this week.”

AMD presented both SPECint (integer) and SPECfp (floating point) performance comparisons with the Broadwell as well as price point comparisons (how much performance the same number of dollars will be of each processor) some of which are shown below.

“We’re tiering products in 32, 24, and 16-core ranges,” said Aylor. The idea, of course, is satisfy widely varying needs. The top end aimed at scale out and HPC workloads, he said. The bottom tier allows users to closely manage per core licensing costs. “We have tried to cover the vast majority of the market that exists today in the Broadwell family,” says Aylor. Every product will have a dedicated security processor.

“Sometime people will say benchmarks are interesting but how do you do in the real world. Well we will showcase a fluid dynamics HPC workload, Apache/Spark, and software defined storage reference architecture [at the launch]. We will also have an open stack cloud based implementation,” said Aylor. AMD was expecting on the order 600 attendees for the EPYC launch.

Moving back into the datacenter is a huge bet by AMD that’s required a very substantial investment in the Zen core and EPYC. Seeking to buttress the gamble, AMD has seemingly got buy-in from several market makers and many ecosystem partners. Here are four endorsements included in the official release; while the statements are on the over enthusiastic side they nonetheless suggest AMD has done productive groundwork with partners:

• HPE. “The EPYC processor represents a paradigm shift in computing and will usher in a new era for the IT ecosystem,” said Antonio Neri, EVP and general manager Enterprise Group, HPE. “Starting with the Cloudline CL3150 and expanding into other product lines later this year, the arrival of EPYC in HPE systems will be welcomed by customers who are eager to deploy the performance and innovation EPYC delivers.”
• Dell EMC. “As an industry leader, we are committed to driving IT Transformation for our customers,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president, server solutions division at Dell EMC, “Our next generation of PowerEdge servers are the bedrock of the modern datacenter that are designed to maximize business scalability and intelligent automation with integrated security. The combination of PowerEdge and the AMD EPYC performance and security capabilities will create unique compute solutions for our customers to accelerate workloads and protect their business.”
• Baidu. “As the world’s largest Chinese language search engine and leading AI-Tech company, Baidu prides itself on simplifying a complex world through technology,” said By Dr. Zhang Ya Qin, president of Baidu. “The AMD EPYC processor powered one-socket server can significantly increase our datacenter computing efficiency, reduce TCO and lower energy consumption. We will start deploying with the launch of AMD EPYC and I look forward to our cooperation leading to scaled EPYC adoption this year, and ongoing innovations.”
• Microsoft. “We’ve worked to make Microsoft Azure a powerful enterprise grade cloud platform, that helps guide the success of our customers, no matter their size or geography,” said Girish Bablani, corporate vice president, Azure Compute, Microsoft Corp. “To power Azure, we require the most cutting-edge infrastructure and the latest advances in silicon which is why we intend to be the first global cloud provider to deliver AMD EPYC, and its combination of high performance and value, to customers.”

The single socket gambit is another interesting aspect to AMD’s initiative. Currently two socket servers rule the roost.

Here’s the AMD pitch: “In our one socket offering we have come up with a clever way to maintain all of the I/O capabilities that you would get in a two socket as well as the full complement of eight memory channels. Today people buy two socket, sometimes because they need to, but more often than not because they have to. There are many examples in which I/O rich [workloads] like storage, like GPU compute, and some vertical workloads where people don’t necessarily need two sockets from a CPU performance perspective,” said Aylor.

AMD’s single socket offering cuts costs substantially, according to Aylor. “We’ve selectively optimized a couple of skews for one socket only. So these are skews that are one socket capable only,” said Aylor. As an example of how the one socket and two socket offerings are distinguished, he cited on package interconnect, “The infinity fabric that would normally connect the two sockets in a two socket system, we repurpose that interconnect into more I/O lanes and that’s how you have in a two socket solution 128 lanes of PCIe and in a one socket solution you still keep the same level of connectivity.”

AMD has singled out a number of vertical as good fits for one socket EPYC servers. Perhaps not surprisingly, storage is one. “Not only base line storage but software defined storage with EPYC’s ability to attach a massive number of SATA drives to a one socket. We also see a strong opportunity in certain areas of high performance computing, especially those that tend to focus on memory bound application. And we have an oil and gas reservoir simulation demo,” said Aylor.

Link to AMD press release: https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/amd-unveils-record-setting-epyc-datacenter-processor/