AMD today announced its 3rd Gen Epyc Milan-SPs with up to 64 cores and 128 threads and a boost clock of a whopping 4.1GHz (single-core). Leveraging the new Zen 3 core, the new lineup is a substantial step up from Rome, offering as much as 117% higher performance than its nearest Intel Xeon Gold rivals.
Across the Spec Int FP benchmarks, the 3rd Gen Epyc processors are 106% faster than the 29-core Xeon Gold, its closest Intel rival. The top-end Milan part is up to 117% faster than the 28-core Xeon Platinum when it comes to virtualization, showing a performance uplift of more than 20% over the preceding Rome parts.
The 64-core Epyc 7763 manages a total of 509 active VDI sessions, versus just 240 on the Xeon 6258R, all the while offering better latency across the entire workload. The list goes on and on. Before we look at some of the finer details, here’s the Epyc 7003 lineup with the specs and prices:
Like Rome, you can choose between 16 to 64 cores, with a boost clock of up to 4GHz on a single core. There are 8 DDR4-3200 memory channels, and 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes. The starting price for the 16-core variant is just over $900, with the flagship 64-core SKU costing close to $8,000. AMD’s also launching the “F” series at the very beginning with improved per-core performance, topping out at 32 cores and a boost clock of 4GHz across the board.
With Milan, AMD is introducing CPU memory interleaving which allows clients to achieve the highest bandwidth at any particular memory and core budget. This is basically done by spreading the load across the eight channels, therefore avoiding channel hot-spotting.
Hardware-level vulnerabilities, most notably control flow, and side-channel attacks have been a hot topic as of late. On this note, AMD has incorporated two new features, namely Shadow Stack and SEV-SNP (Secure Nested Paging) to improve its repertoire.
Other than that, you’ve also got hardware validated boot, complete memory encryption, and a dedicated 32-bit microcontroller integrated within the SoC. Lastly, AMD is seeing significantly increased adoption with Milan, with the following major ODMs/OEMs already on board:
- 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 EPYC7003 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 3rdGeneration 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 3rdGen 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.
