Items tagged with epyc
Processor core counts are skyrocketing these days, both on the consumer side and of course in the workstation sector. In regards to the latter, Intel last week announced the immediate availability of its Xeon E-2100 processors targeted at small and medium size businesses, and also a 48-core Cascade Lake CPU for burlier workloads. According to Intel's own testing, the 48-core chip trounces AMD's Epyc 7601 processor. Let's back up a moment. Intel is gearing up to launch a line of Cascade Lake-SP Xeon processors built on a 14-nanometer plus-plus (14nm++) manufacturing process, set to debut before...
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There's no question that Intel has held a stranglehold on the enterprise CPU market with its family of Xeon processors. However, that all began to change last year with the introduction of AMD's first Zen-based EPYC processors which offered impressive performance at eyebrow-raising price points for potential customers. While AMD has gained some server market share thanks to EPYC, it is really looking to turn the tide with its second-generation EPYC products based on 7nm Zen 2 architecture. These new processors are part of the "Rome" family and are currently sampling to customers. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa...
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AMD has an event scheduled for this coming Tuesday which is entitled "AMD Next Horizon". Heading over to the landing page on AMD's site for the event presents nothing but a blank page at this point, but we expect for things to start filling in November 6th. If you recall, back in early December 2016 AMD held a "New Horizon" event that revealed the first details on its Zen processors built on 14nm Summit Ridge architecture. At the event, AMD first referenced the Ryzen brand name and championed a 40 percent uplift in instructions per clock (IPC). By all accounts, Tuesday's event will be...
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AMD is well along in development on its 7nm Zen 2 architecture that will be hitting the market in 2019. 12nm Zen+ Pinnacle Ridge architecture provided roughly a low single-digit uplift in instructions per clock (IPC) compared to 14nm Summit Ridge, but AMD has more ambitious goals for Zen 2. Back in July, it was rumored that Zen 2 would offer an IPC lift (at the same clock rates) of 10 to 15 percent compared to Zen+. Now, according to a tweet from Bits and Chips, it looks as though early performance numbers are hitting right in the middle of that performance range,...
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AMD has been on the attack in the CPU war over the last several months as its Ryzen consumer CPUs and EPYC server CPUs continue to put pressure on Intel. We recently talked about the surge in EPYC server CPU sales forcing Intel to cut prices on its Xeon parts to better compete. While the current EPYC processors are doing very well, some benchmarks have surfaced that are allegedly from an upcoming EPYC 7nm "Rome" server processor. The benchmarks alleged to be from the chip were posted over at Chiphell, and the results are claimed to be from an engineering sample Rome server processor. AMD has previously...
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AMD recently posted its best quarterly earnings in seven years, with its Ryzen and Epyc product lines boosting the company's bottom line. The reception to its Zen-based products is obviously good news for AMD. For rival Intel, however, AMD's resurgence puts added pressure to execute its roadmaps. It also could be leading to price cuts. Where this is particularly interesting is in the server market. After a year on the market, AMD noted that its EPYC sales "continue to accelerate, with new platform deployments and commitments from industry leaders." HPE, for example, launched two new EPYC platforms,...
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AMD is flying high on its best quarterly earnings in seven years, bolstered by a 53 percent year-over-year jump in revenue to $1.76 billion in the second quarter of 2018, the company announced just a short while ago. Riding its resurgence from Ryzen and Epyc, AMD posted a profit of $116 million for the quarter. That's a $158 million difference from the $42 million loss the company posted in the same quarter a year ago, and a $35 million sequential jump. "We had an outstanding second quarter with strong revenue growth, margin expansion and our highest quarterly net income in seven years," said Dr....
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Earlier this month, a little-known Israeli security company named CTS Labs disclosed a number of vulnerabilities that affect AMD's Zen-based processor family. The exploits -- Masterkey, Ryzenfall, Fallout, and Chimera -- involve the Secure Processor found onboard Ryzen and EPYC products and the supporting Ryzen chipset. At the time, AMD provided the following statement: We are actively investigating and analyzing its findings. This company was previously unknown to AMD and we find it unusual for a security firm to publish its research to the press without providing a reasonable amount of time for...
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Given the industry-wide panic that was unleashed following the disclosure of the Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities (with Intel taking the brunt of the heat), many are on edge about the potential for similar exploits to be discovered in other products. Unfortunately, for those that are running AMD's current Zen-based processor architecture, researchers claim to have discovered over a dozen new critical security flaws that affect the Ryzen and EPYC processor families. According to CTS-Labs, a fledgling Israeli security firm that first reported on the chip flaws, vulnerabilities...
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Baidu isn’t a huge name here in the U.S., but in China, it is a behemoth internet search provider. Baidu isn’t all about search though and much like Google, it has fingers in lots of pies including artificial intelligence (AI). Baidu and AMD have announced a partnership that will see the firm deploying single-socket AMD EPYC platforms for its ABC Datacenters. ABC stands for AI, big data, and cloud computing services. The single socket EPYC platforms will be used by Baidu to optimize and deliver storage and computer services to customers. AMD notes that Baidu plans to roll out expanded...
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Intel recently touted an array of benchmarks comparing its latest Xeon Scalable Processors (Skylake-SP) in a two-socket configuration to the performance of a similarly configured 2P Xeon E5026xx v4 (Broadwell-EP) system and a competing dual socket AMD EPYC 7601-based system. In discussing the benchmarks, however, Intel makes it clear that the results are all externally published and that the they are third-party auditable, to ensure no one can cry foul when comparing the results. It should be noted, however, that Intel used its own compilers for these tests. On the AMD system, a...
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As part of AMD's comeback tour into the high-end market sector, it released new CPU and GPU architectures, Zen and Vega respectively. And with Zen, AMD has been focused on attacking every market sector, including mainstream desktops (Ryzen 3/5/7), high-end desktops (Threadripper), mobile (Ryzen 5 Mobile, or Raven Ridge), and server (EPYC). Building upon that latter segment, AMD is readying a new Snowy Owl platform for embedded system-on-chip (SoC) applications.Snowy Owl is the codename for Epyc 3251, an Epyc 3000 series chip that will be AMD's first Zen-based SoC. It will sit in an embedded SoC...
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AMD's Zen architecture has proven to be a boon for the company in its fight against Intel. AMD first gave us a taste of how powerful Zen is with the Ryzen 7 processors, which were followed up by Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3. Later, we were taken by surprise with Ryzen Threadripper, which offers up to 16 cores of workstation-class computing greatness. Finally, AMD pulled the wraps off EPYC, which is a server-class processor family offering up to 32-cores and 64 threads of compute power. It's that last product family that is the focus of our attention today. Canard PC Hardware, a French website with a pretty...
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Over the weekend, we talked about an issue surrounding AMD's Ryzen-based processors on Unix-based OSes. Today, we learn a lot more about what's going on, as well as which products are actually affected. But first, let's get the upside out of the way: this bug is rare, and requires very specific conditions. The vast majority of users are not going to experience an issue, but it's at least an issue to be aware of. With almost comical timing, SMT issues surrounding both FreeBSD and Linux were outed at around the same time, although it's now been confirmed that the issues are different. Through exhaustive...
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