AMD Launches 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processor to World Record Performance and New Customers, Including Google and Twitter

2^nd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors Set New Standard for the Modern Datacenter with Record-Breaking Performance and Significant TCO Savings

—    AMD EPYC™ 7002 Series processors set 80 performance world records[i], provide 2X the performance compared to the previous generation[ii] and deliver
an estimated 25% to 50% lower TCO than competitive offerings[iii] —

—    Google and Twitter join growing list of customers adopting AMD EPYC processors —

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — At a launch event, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) was joined by an expansive ecosystem of datacenter partners and customers to introduce the 2^nd Generation AMD EPYC™ family of processors that deliver performance leadership across a broad number of enterprise, cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors feature up to 64 “Zen 2” cores in leading-edge 7nm process technology to deliver record-setting performance while helping reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 50% across numerous workloads[iv]. At the event, Google and Twitter announced new 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processor deployments and HPE and Lenovo announced immediate availability of new platforms.

“Today, we set a new standard for the modern datacenter with the launch of our 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors that deliver record-setting performance and significantly lower total cost of ownership across a broad set of workloads,” said Dr. Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. “Adoption of our new leadership server processors is accelerating with multiple new enterprise, cloud and HPC customers choosing EPYC processors to meet their most demanding server computing needs.” 

2^nd Gen EPYC Processors Expand the AMD Datacenter Customer and Partner Ecosystem

At the launch event, several customers and partners joined AMD on stage to discuss new AMD EPYC processor offerings:

·        Google announced it has deployed 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors in its internal infrastructure production datacenter environment and in late 2019 will support new general-purpose machines powered by 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors on Google Cloud Compute Engine as well;

·        Twitter announced it will deploy 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors across its datacenter infrastructure later this year, reducing TCO by 25%;

·        Microsoft announced the preview of new Azure virtual machines for general purpose applications, as well as limited previews of cloud-based remote desktops and HPC workloads based on 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors today;

·        HPE announced continued support of the AMD EPYC processor family with plans to triple their AMD-based portfolio with a broad range of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor-based systems, including the HPE ProLiant DL385 and HPE ProLiant DL325 servers;

·        Cray announced The Air Force Weather Agency will be using a Cray Shasta system with 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors to provide comprehensive terrestrial and space weather information to the U.S. Air Force and Army;

·        Lenovo announced new solutions that are specifically built to take advantage of the full range of enhanced capabilities found in the 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors. Available today, the ThinkSystem SR655 and SR635 are ideal solutions for use cases such as video infrastructure, virtualization, software-defined storage and more, with exceptional energy efficiency;

·        Dell announced the upcoming availability of newly designed servers optimized for 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors;

·        VMware and AMD announced a close collaboration to deliver support for new security and other features of the high-performance 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors within VMware vSphere.

“AMD 2^nd Gen EPYC processors will help us continue to do what we do best in our datacenters: innovate,” said Bart Sano, Google vice president of Engineering. “Its scalable compute, memory and I/O performance will expand our ability to drive innovation forward in our infrastructure and will give Google Cloud customers the flexibility to choose the best VM for their workloads.”

Designed for Modern Workloads: Enterprise, Cloud and HPC

Second Gen AMD EPYC™ processors are specifically designed for modern datacenter workloads, providing customers an ideal combination of features to help unlock performance and redefine economics in virtualization, cloud, HPC and enterprise applications.

For the enterprise datacenter, 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors offer up to 83% better Java application performance[v], up to 43% better SAP SD 2 Tier performance[vi] than the competition and provide world record performance on Real Time Analytics with Hadoop[vii]. 

For modern cloud and virtualization workloads, 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors deliver world record virtualization[viii] performance that redefines datacenter economics.

For HPC, 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors offer an unmatched combination of record-setting floating point performance[ix] and the most DRAM memory[x] and I/O bandwidth in its class to supercharge HPC workloads, including up to 2x better performance in computational fluid dynamics[xi] and up to 72% higher performance structural analysis[xii].

AMD Design Innovation Brings Breakthrough Architecture for the Datacenter

The 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processor combines leadership performance, architecture and security features to meet the most demanding challenges facing the datacenter. Highlights of the AMD EPYC 7002 generation processor family include:

·        Leadership Performance: Featuring up to 64 “Zen 2” cores per SOC, 2^nd Gen EPYC processors deliver up to 23% more instructions per clock (IPC) per core on server workloads[xiii] and up to 4X more L3 Cache compared to the previous generation.

·        Leadership Architecture: The next-generation AMD Infinity Architecture pushes the boundaries for x86 performance and compute capabilities, giving customers access to the most I/O[xiv] and memory bandwidth[xv] in its class, including PCIe Generation 4, to unleash the very latest in server performance.

·        Leadership Security Features: Delivering “hardened at the core” features based on a silicon embedded security subsystem and advanced security features like Secure Memory Encryption and Secure Encrypted Virtualization that help customers guard their most important assets and data.

A Growing Partner Ecosystem

The AMD EPYC ecosystem continues to grow with more than 60 partners supporting the launch on day one. The broad partner ecosystem including ODMs like Gigabyte and QCT, IHVs like Broadcom, Micron and Xilinx, and broad operating system support including Microsoft and multiple Linux distributions. For Linux Canonical, RedHat and SUSE collaborated with AMD to test and validate solutions based on the 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors for a wide range of datacenter use cases. This validation helped the 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processor achieve more than 2X platforms in development compared to the 1st Gen EPYC processors.

You can read more about the expanding AMD EPYC ecosystem and the 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processor here at the AMD blog. 

The 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processor-based systems are available now from the AMD EPYC ecosystem partners. Learn more about where to purchase those systems here.

Supporting Partner and Customer Quotes

“Twitter is committed to reducing our environmental impact of our datacenters by finding innovative ways to increase efficiency. The 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processor provides us the sweet spot of performance and energy consumption that we need to honor that commitment, while supporting the high traffic volume on our platform,” Jennifer Fraser, senior director of Engineering at Twitter. “Using the AMD EPYC 7702 processor we can scale out our compute clusters with more cores in less space using less power, which translates to a 25% lower TCO for Twitter.”

“Customers today are asking for secure, workload-optimized servers that can drive new experiences and value for their customers,” said Justin Hotard, senior vice president and general manager, Volume Global Business Unit at HPE. “With the addition of new 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC™-equipped servers to our portfolio, HPE delivers an unprecedented number of world-record performance and efficiency results aligned to a wide range of cloud and datacenter workloads, and unmatched security capabilities. We will continue to deliver innovative products with AMD and look forward to building on our longstanding collaborative relationship.”

“As we enter a new era of computing, the exascale era, we’re seeing new workloads, new infrastructure, a new way of thinking – and this requires capabilities and performance like we get from our next-generation Shasta supercomputer combined with AMD EPYC processors,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO at Cray. “Since Cray announced support for AMD processors in our systems over a year ago, we’ve booked almost $800 million in AMD EPYC-based systems. With the 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors connected via our new Slingshot system interconnect, we’re able to deliver the performance our customers require for the exascale era.”

“Today, through our expanded relationship with AMD, we are pushing boundaries on performance and efficiency in ways that will accelerate our customers’ intelligent transformation. Our new ThinkSystem solutions, powered by next-generation AMD EPYC™ 7002 Series processors, allow users to store and access huge amounts of data,” said Doug Fisher, chief operating officer and senior vice president of Business Units, DCG Solutions, Lenovo. “The greater storage, processing and graphics capabilities unlock the potential of enhanced video security and other critical applications for edge and virtualized environments. A perfect example is video security in smart city, campus and mass transit environments where public safety organizations need that additional computing power in confined spaces using less energy so they can better monitor and analyze potential threats.”  

“As workloads become more demanding and complex, Dell Technologies is focused on helping organizations succeed in dynamic environments using innovative and industry-leading server designs,” said Ravi Pendekanti, senior vice president of product management, Server & Infrastructure Systems, Dell Technologies. “Through close collaboration with AMD, we are addressing the demands of traditional, virtualized, hybrid and multi-cloud workloads with a broad portfolio of PowerEdge servers, including newly designed servers optimized for 2^nd Generation AMD EPYC processors.”

“VMware and AMD’s ongoing engineering collaboration is focused on delivering optimal application performance and security for our mutual customers,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware. “We both see the value in driving security deeper into the infrastructure especially as modern IT infrastructure becomes more distributed. The Secure Encrypted Virtualization feature in the 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processor will help protect customers’ critical data across the multi-site datacenter fabric. Combined with AMD’s legendary processor performance, we expect our mutual customers will be able to gain efficiencies and security capabilities to power their workloads.”

2^nd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processor Stack

S