AMD CEO unveils 4th Gen Epyc with 3X performance of rivals

Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su launched the company’s 4th Gen Epyc processors today.

Santa Clara, California-based AMD, unveiled the new family of processors based on the Zen 4 architecture, which has given the company an advantage over rivals like Intel.

She said Fourth Gen Epyc with up to 96 cores has three times the performance of the competition. Su said the processors deliver leadership performance and energy efficiency for datacenter applications.

AMD started on its Epyc processors back in 2017, when its well-designed Zen 1 core made it much more competitive against Intel’s then-dominant microprocessors.

The consumer and server processors based on Zen caught hold in the market and drove a big turnaround for AMD with years of market share gains against Intel. Mark Papermaster, CTO, said that Zen disrupted the industry in 2017, as it brought energy efficiency and performance gains at the same time. It added both Zen 4 coming now and Zen 4c (with energy efficiency in mind) coming in early 2023.

By 2021, AMD’s Milan version of Epyc had a 40% performance lead over Intel’s Icelake, and now AMD is on its fourth version of its Epyc processor family, starting today.

“I’m very proud to say fourth Gen Epyc delivers leadership on every single dimension,” Su said.

AMD is in a period of renewal with the launch of new Ryzen and RDNA 3 chips. And now it’s refreshing the Epyc product line for the first time since 2021.

“Over the last five years we have consistently delivered three generations of Epyc,” Su said. “Every major cloud provider has deployed Epyc.”

Nearly 600 Epyc cloud instances are available. Five of the top 10 most powerful supercomputers and eight of the top ten most efficient supercomputers are using Epyc.

“In the enterprise, we also see significant deployment of Epyc,” Su said.

The right datacenter CPU has efficiency and sustainability in mind as well. Power consumption is becoming a significant limiter in datacenters, Su said. And in some parts of the world, energy costs have gone up five times, she said.

She noted that you can save millions of dollars across datacenters since you can achieve the same performance as 15 Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 processors with only five 4th Gen Epyc processors.

“Compute is actually used to transform and drive the core business of the organization,” she added.

Fourth Gen Epyc uses 5-nanometer manufacturing (and 6-nanometer for chiplets used for memory) to pack 90 billion transistors into the processor, Su said. Microsoft Azure said it will be launching virtual machine instances based on Fourth Gen Epyc.

Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said on stage the pace of innovation that AMD has been able to achieve has been “incredible.”

HPE CEO Antonio Neri said his company has partnered with AMD on the earlier Epyc chips with the Frontier supercomputer. And now HPE is adding six new platforms using the 4th Gen Epyc processors. Google Cloud is also using Epyc processors and it touted the confidential computing features.