AMD officially unveils the fifth generation of its Eypc chips for data center servers, developed with Zen 5. With up to 192 cores, AMD is setting a new core record.
At its Advancing AI conference in San Francisco, AMD is expected to have presented a new generation of Epyc server processors. CEO Lisa Su gets the honor of showing the first Epyc Turin chip to the world With the new chips, AMD aims to expand its footprint in the data center. AMD is rapidly gaining ground on Intel within the server market and wants to capitalize on that momentum.
As usual, the chips are named after an Italian city. After Naples, Rome, Milan, Genoa, Bergamo and Siena, AMD’s own Giro d’Italia is now stopping in Turin. The road to Epyc Turin was paved earlier this year with the announcement of Zen 5 and Zen 5c, the chips’ underlying architecture.
Counting cores
“Epyc Turin is a beast,” Dan McNamara, head of the server branch within AMD, says without blinking about the latest generation. The server chips come in many flavors. Most chip models are developed on Zen 5 (4 nm), with some high-end models built on the more efficient Zen 5c (3 nm).
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The flagship of the Epyc Turin generation is the 9965, which bundles a whopping 192 Zen 5c cores and 150 billion transistors. Add to that 500 W TDP and 384 MB of L3 cache and you get the beast McNamara describes. Consequently, you’ll pay more than $14,000 per unit for this chip.
Those who need fewer cores can choose from a wide range starting at 8 cores, available starting at $527. Even chips that are less powerful on paper have tricks up their sleeves. The 9575F, for example, has 64 cores but can be boosted to 5 GHz. This chip delivers up to 28 percent performance gains for AI workloads when combined with a GPU.
Seven to one
When new chips are announced, benchmarks are naturally waved. Epyc Turin delivers up to seventeen percent higher instructions per cycle for cloud workloads and up to 37 percent higher IPC for AI compared to the Zen 4 generation. AMD retains the SP5 socket to simplify the transition from Zen 4 to Zen 5.
Compared to Intel, AMD claims up to four times faster processing for business applications, 3.9 times for HPC workloads, 3.7 times for AI and 1.6 times for virtualization. Ravi Kuppuswamy, SVP Server Product and Engineering, even ventures that one AMD Epyc 9965 server can replace up to seven legacy Intel Xeon Platinum servers.
Those benchmarks come with a small caveat, as they are still based on a comparison with Intel’s Xeon 5 generation, also known as Emerald Rapids. In late September, Intel launched the Xeon 6 chips, or Granite Rappids, but a comprehensive comparison has not yet been made. At the conference, there is not a shred of doubt that Epyc Turin will measure up to Intel Xeon 6. At least AMD does win the battle for the most cores: Intel Xeon 6 goes up to a maximum of 128 cores.
Finally, AMD Epyc Turin adds another layer of security on the chip with Trusted I/O . With this capability, “data can be protected in any direction that it moves, even beyond the CPU,” Kuppuswamy said.