AMD Releases Second Generation Epyc Server Processors With Up To 64 Cores

AMD has officially presented its second generation of Epyc server processors. The top model is the Epyc 7742 with 64 cores and a TDP of 225W. The processor has a turbo of up to 3.4GHz, reaches 3.2GHz on all cores and costs $6950.

AMD announces a total of nineteen processors in its Epyc 7002 series. The server processors, like the Ryzen 3000 processors, are based on the Zen 2 architecture with 7nm CPU chiplets. For the larger server processors, AMD is increasing the number of cores to 64, bringing the number of available threads to 128.

At the presentation, AMD also announced which companies are deploying or will be deploying second-generation Epyc processors. These include Google, Twitter, Microsoft, HPE, Cray, Lenovo, Dell and VMware. AMD says the Zen 2 cores contain hardware fixes against all of the Specter vulnerabilities that the CPUs were vulnerable to.

The Epyc 7002 processors support PCI-e 4.0 and offer 128 lanes. In systems where two Epyc processors are placed on one motherboard, half of all lanes are used for communication between the processors. According to Hardware Info, which was present at the presentation, it is also possible not to use one pci-e x16 connection for mutual communication. Then the number of available lanes in systems with two Epyc CPUs increases to 160.

With the Epyc processors, the i/o die is made at 14nm. This includes the memory controller and the controllers for SATA and USB. AMD gives its Epyc CPUs eight DDR4-3200 memory channels, with which a maximum of 4TB of RAM can be controlled per socket. The CPU chiplets communicate with each other via the I/O die. The latency is therefore lower than with the first generation Epyc processors, which communicated via Infinity Fabric connections between the core complexes.

Epyc 7002 processors fit into the same SP3 socket as the first generation. However, a bios update is required for the motherboards. AMD releases variants with a minimum of 8 cores and a maximum of 64 cores. Most processors can also be placed in dual-socket motherboards, only the P variants cannot.

AnandTech has a test sample of the Epyc 7742 and has run a number of benchmarks. The site compares AMD’s flagship model with a number of Xeon server processors from Intel and concludes that the Epyc offers better value for money. Phoronix has also conducted tests and comes to the same conclusion.