AMD announces Epyc 9004: up to 96 cores for around $12,000

In context: AMD took the viewers on a curler coaster trip because it unveiled the fourth era of Epyc information heart processors at a dwell occasion final week. The presenters hurled quantity after quantity on the viewers the entire approach via, so buckle up as we break them down.

We must always begin with the identify of the collection: 9004, following on from 7003, 7002, and 7001. Why the 9? Undecided, however the trailing 4 is a reference to each the era and the structure, Zen 4. The codename for the collection is/was Genoa, persevering with AMD’s custom of naming Epyc collection after Italian cities, which previously has included Milan, Rome, and Naples.

AMD has additionally developed an affinity for the quantity 5. Eight channels of DDR4 have develop into twelve channels of DDR5-4800 (for as much as 6 TB per socket), and 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0 have given strategy to 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and 64 lanes of CXL 1.1+. The collection additionally switches from TSMC 7nm to 5nm and adopts a brand new socket, known as SP5 (LGA 6096). And lastly, AMD lastly joins Intel with help for the AVX-512 instruction set.

*All costs are for orders of 1000 models.

AMD introduced 18 fashions in complete (tabulated above and beneath). They span from 16 cores to 96 and have suffixes that denote their kind: F, for quick and inefficient; P, for single-socket solely; and no suffix, for regular and dual-socket. AMD shared way more detailed specs than we might match right here, issues like cache capacities and configurable TDPs, so should you’re , begin with AMD’s information sheet after which try their documentation web page for Genoa.

AMD is claiming that Zen 4 has a ~14% IPC benefit over Zen 3 in server situations. It says the uplift is attributable to a doubling of the L2 cache capability to 1 MB and enhancements within the entrance finish, department prediction, load/retailer, and the execution engine. Genoa additionally greater than doubles the theoretical reminiscence bandwidth of every socket from 205 GB/s to 461 GB/s.

Added with the marginally greater clock pace and the vastly elevated core depend of the 9654, the brand new flagship is 1.9x quicker than the earlier one, based on AMD, which used the Java-based SPECjbb 2015 device as a benchmark. After all, the 9654 prices $11,805, and the 64-core 7763 prices a 3rd much less at $7,890, however the Genoa half remains to be higher worth.

When you’re not offered on AMD’s cherry-picked numbers, Phoronix has a complete launch day overview of the 9654 and the 9554. It is value a learn, however the backside line says that the brand new Epyc elements come out on prime in each multi-core benchmark and land amidst the Intel Xeon elements in gentle single-threaded workloads. Genoa’s flagships simply “extra” in each approach: extra efficiency, extra energy consumption, and dearer. However they’re so quick that they are nonetheless extra environment friendly and higher worth than the competitors.