AMD celebrates the one year anniversary of their EPYC CPU today and hosted a short webinar earlier to talk about their journey in the server space till now and where they are headed in the future.
AMD Celebrates One Year Anniversary of EPYC, An EPIC Entry Back Into The Server Space – Reaffirms 7nm EPYC ‘Rome’ Schedule and Future Zen Iterations Beyond 2020
There’s no doubt that AMD made a grand comeback in the server space with their highly disruptive EPYC platform. Returning right on time when Intel was at their most fragile position with little to no progress being made towards the 10nm process development, stagnant IPC evolution and very less impressive feature updates on the server side. Sure Purley platform itself was supposed to deliver a good amount of features to consumers but EPYC made that look like child’s play comparison. Just to tell you how much of an impact EPYC made in the server market, Intel’s CEO, said in an interview recently that they are expecting to lose server CPU market share to AMD’s EPYC processors.
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Furthermore, with EPYC, AMD’s first proper server platform in a decade since Opterons, the red team made a proper plan to tackle Intel Xeon CPUs on all fronts. They weren’t just going for the flagship parts, they were aiming Intel at every price point and in single and multi-socket configs. However, AMD isn’t just stopping with the first lineup of EPYC, it’s just gonna get more epic in the coming years.
At Computex 2018, AMD announced that they are sampling the second generation, 7nm based EPYC ‘Rome’ processors in 2H 2018. AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, even held a 7nm EPYC processor in her hands, showcasing it to the audience. The same processors are currently in AMD labs and being evaluated. Now at their one-year anniversary webinar, AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager of Datacenter and Embedded Solutions, Forrest Norrod, reaffirmed that they are going to bring 7nm processors are per scheduled in early 2019.
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Named after famous destinations in Italy, the EPYC 1st ‘Naples’, 2nd ‘Rome’ and 3rd ‘Milan’ gen CPUs are and will be available on time to consumers. AMD is saying that they are going to bring higher core count than ever before, more disruptive bandwidth and all of this will be available on existing sockets. So companies who were previously running 1st gen EPYC CPUs can just swap in the latest processors without the need to update platform. In addition to that, we can expect the 7nm+ Zen 3 based EPYC ‘Milan’ CPUs around 2020. But there’s more after Zen 3.
Forrest Nord also mentioned that they are going to bring Zen 4 and Zen 5 architecture based processors in the post-2020 era. There were no details mentioned but it’s great to see that AMD is following a long-term roadmap which will make Intel think twice about their own roadmap which includes an entirely next-gen core architecture beyond 2020.
