German supercomputer includes AMD Epyc ‘Rome’ processors with 64 cores at 2.35GHz

The Hawk supercomputer at the High-Performance Computing Center at the University of Stuttgart uses AMD Epyc CPUs with 64 cores at a speed of 2.35GHz. It seems to be the Epyc 2 processors that are made at 7nm.

At the SC18 conference, the German university and HPE announced details about their Hawk supercomputer, ComputerBase writes. AMD’s first-generation Epyc processors have up to 32 cores. AMD has already announced that the successor, codenamed Rome, will get up to 64 cores. The processor manufacturer has not yet commented on clock speeds.

It is not certain whether the speed of 2.35GHz refers to the base clock or the maximum turbo speed with all cores active. The current top model from the AMD Epyc series, the Epyc 7601, runs at 2.2GHz and has a maximum turbo speed of 2.7GHz with all cores active.

AMD released the first details about the Zen 2 architecture used for the new Epyc processors last week. The CPUs consist of a new design with so-called CPU chiplets, which are made on the 7nm process of TSMC and contain the cores. These are connected to an I/O that is made on the 14nm process of GlobalFoundries.

AMD also tells ComputerBase that reporting on IPC improvements of 29 percent for Zen 2 over the first Zen generation is incorrect. Some media wrote that, based on a footnote in AMD’s presentation. According to AMD, this was a microbenchmark for a very specific workload where such an improvement is visible. It does not mean that the new architecture in general delivers such a big improvement when it comes to instructions per cycle.

AMD CEO Lisa Su Shows Off Epyc ‘Rome’ Processor