Epyc Roadmap Gets Specialized

November 23, 2021 - Author: Bob Wheeler

By train, Genoa is less than two hours from Milan. In AMD’s roadmap, however, they’re more than a year apart. The company revealed that Genoa is sampling to customers and is on track for 2022 production, but it declined to narrow that timeframe. Its first 5nm Epyc, Genoa includes up to 96 Zen 4 CPU cores, a 50% increase over the shipping Epyc 7xx3 (Milan). Bergamo, due for early-2023 production, will introduce the Zen 4C core, which will be optimized for power efficiency relative to the Zen 4 in Genoa. Tuning for power will enable AMD to pack 128 cores into the new Epyc server processor positioned for cloud computing.

In parallel with Genoa, the company developed the specialized Milan-X, which introduces a 3D structure called V-Cache. Although Milan-X won’t launch until 1Q22, it already appears in private preview Microsoft Azure compute instances. With an astounding 768MB of L3 cache, the specialized parts aim for memory-bound workloads including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), EDA, and finite-element analysis. Like the Epyc 7xx3, Milan-X has up to 64 cores and uses the SP3 socket. It follows Milan’s success in high-performance computing, where it captured 17 systems in the latest Top500 list, including the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.