AMD announces new EPYC CPUs with big performance boost for data centres

After making inroads in the server market, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is coming for more with a new lineup of EPYC processors for data centres.  

At the company’s Accelerated Data Centre event, AMD CEO Lisa Su unveiled the EPYC Milan-X processors with 3D V-Cache-- a 3D-stacked L3 cache that offers up to 768MB of total L3 cache per chip.  

According to AMD, the Milan X processor offers more than a 50% boost compared to the previous-gen EPYC 7003 Series processor and is the fastest server processor for technical computing workloads.  

The new lineup of EPYC processors will be available in Q1 2022 with solutions from partner companies such as Cisco, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, HPE, and SuperMicro.  

AMD had first unveiled the 3D V-Cache at the Computex 2021 with 3rd gen Ryzen chipset for PCs.  

The company demoed how the technology can triple the amount of L3 cache for the CPU cores.  

L3 cache is a specialised memory bank in the CPU module that serves as a backup for your L1 and L2 caches and improves their performance.  

The data centre business has seen huge growth in the last few years due to increasing migration to the cloud and digital transformation initiatives.  

The recent advances and performance boost in EPYC CPUs have helped AMD dent Intel’s share in the server CPU market this year.  

AMD has managed to get high-profile customers such as Google Cloud and now Meta, formerly Facebook to use EPYC CPUs.  

AMD’s EPYC CPUs accounted for 16% of the server market in Q2 2021, according to data by Omdia Data Center Server Market Tracker, published September.  

AMD also announced its 4th Gen AMD EPYC processor, codenamed Genoa, for general-purpose computing and AMD Instinct MI200 Accelerators for neural network inference.