- While AMD endured a relatively
lackluster Ryzen 7,000 launch, thanks to fierce competition
from everyone's favorite budget offering, Intel,
in the data center, AMD is pulling no punches.
With today's announcement of EPYC Genoa,
they're bringing double digit IPC improvements,
a maximum of 96 cores per socket,
a whopping 12 channels of DDR5 memory.
I don't even have that many fingers.
And so much more.
We're gonna tell you what's new
and why Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids
probably won't be able to compete with this spicy salami.
Mama Mia, oh, (speaking foreign language)
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- For those that haven't been paying attention,
let's get you up to speed.
AMD has been releasing their EPYC line
of server processors based on the Zen architecture
since 2017 with the first generation dubbed Naples.
Not until the more recent EPYC Rome in 2019
in Milan in 2021, however,
did AMD actually manage to compete
and then beat Intel, taking the performance crown.
This is in part due to core count.
Intel's monolithic style processors
capped out of a measly 40 cores per socket
compared to AMD's 64 core chiplet designs.
Back in 2021, Intel hoped to compete against EPYC Milan
with their own chiplet-based design
code named Sapphire Rapids
but ended up delaying due to technical difficulties
and poor yields to a now confirmed January, 2023 launch.
And they're still on 10 nanometer
or Intel seven now, they call it Intel seven.
We don't say nanometer, come on.
Things are not looking great
for Intel's enterprise sector right now
because honestly Genoa looks awesome.
The most obvious change with the latest generation
is the new Zen 4 architecture
running on TSMC'S five nanometer process.
Zen 4 is more of a refinement
of Zen 3 rather than a complete redesign
but while much of the micro architecture layout is the same,
improvements have been sprinkled all over.
A big chunk of the claim 14% IPC Uplift
comes from optimizations to the architecture front end
with improved branch prediction
that can predict two branches per cycle rather than just one
and a hefty bump to L2 cache.
They also introduced AVX-512 support
which is gonna be a huge help
for machine learning and AI workloads in the data center.
Speaking of which the other major upgrade this time around
is core counts.
Across the 18 total SKUs launching for Genoa,
the max cores per socket has increased
by a whopping 50%, from 64 to 96 cores
with the minimum core count seeing a bump
from eight to 16 cores on the lowest end SKUs.
Despite the power efficiency improvements
of the new architecture,
maximum socket power consumption is jumping from 280 watts
on the last generation to a whopping 400 watts per socket,
a level that AMD's high performance compute customers
have actually been asking for.
Though the company tells us
they don't expect the power envelope
to climb much beyond this point
and don't expect to get much further into this video
without a mention of our Beanies on lttstore.com.
They put lol in there
but you know what, it's actually getting colder.
Unfortunately, with great power draw
comes great socket demands and Genoa is no exception.
Gone are the days of rectangular oppression.
Say hello to our new square overlords.
Jokes aside, Genoa's new SP5 socket
packs a whopping 6,096 pins, nice?
More like a nice backwards.
It's a similar trade design to the previous SP3 socket
but it's now heat sink-actuated rather than socket-actuated.
That's fancy speak for the cooler
providing the necessary pressure to ensure proper contact
between the CPU and the socket's pins.
It's not dissimilar to the approach Intel's been taking
for a few years now, except AMD thoughtfully
included the lockdown plate for the CPU to prevent you
from accidentally dropping a chip into the socket
in which you wouldn't want to do
since 6,096 nice pins are tiny and expensive,
however, they are not as expensive
as the copious amounts of memory this thing supports
across 12 channels.
We're talking up to six terabytes of DDR5
running at 4,800 mega transfers per second,
allowing for a theoretical peak throughput
of 480 gigabytes per second across the whole thing.
Six terabytes, all without taking too big of a hit
in total latency.
Oh, and if that isn't enough fast memory for you,
AMD is introducing support for CXL.
Wait, what the hell is CXL?
CXL is short for Compute Express Link
and it could very well be a game changer in the server space
and potentially for consumer tech in the future.
It's a cache coherent interconnect standard
built on top of PCI Express 5
that allows for huge increases to IO,
memory and storage flexibility.
In the same way that AMD uses PCI Express lanes
as infinity fabric in their dual socket servers,
CXL uses PCI Express lanes
as low latency, high bandwidth interconnects
allowing the system to pool or expand memory
and improve the performance of various types
of hardware accelerators like GPUs or network cards.
Maybe you need an extra four terabytes of RAM
for more virtualization, I know I do.
Slap in a CXL memory card and you are good to go
and CXL lets you allocate that extra RAM
to other devices if you want to.
General supports CXL 1.1+ Type 3
which is the catchiest name I've read all week
and is primarily focused
on memory expansion rather than accelerators.
CXL is only just coming to the server market
but is primed to be a very important technology
for the future of our computers, so keep an eye on it.
It might come to consumer hardware sooner than you think.
If you're worried that you won't have enough PCIe lanes
for all this stuff, then don't be.
A single CPU provides you
with 128 PCI Express gen five lanes
and up to 160 in two CPU systems
providing ample flexibility in terms of expansion.
And if you wanna see just how much
you can fit into these things,
Supermicro let us unveil their new H13 Genoa Suite.
Check out the link of the description
to see some hands on hardware content.
And last but certainly not least,
AMD introduced a few improvements to their security
such as support for over a thousand
encrypted virtualizations.
That is pretty neat, especially for VPSs.
What kind of performance can we expect
from all of these slick new feature enhancements though?
For starters,
more than double the performance in integer arithmetic
over Intel's 40 core Xeon 8380 flagship,
which is expected,
considering AMD has more than double the cores
and ends up being just an 8% increase per core.
But the customers buying 96 core CPUs like this one,
they would probably actually just want the more cores
rather than faster cores.
So does AMD's dominance then,
carry over to the rest of the product stack?
According to AMD yes, very, yes.
But before we get too far,
please note that AMD has been pretty liberal
with the scaling and their performance graphs,
so try to focus on the numbers themselves
rather than the pictures.
AMD claims that their 24 core EPYC 9274F
will compete with that same 40 core Intel CPU,
at least in integer operations.
Calling integer operations
General Purpose Computing is a bit of a stretch
but even if you cynically assume that all of these CPUs
will perform 25% worse than AMD promises,
you'll still see comparably core AMD skews
competing with Intel's flagships.
Maybe you shouldn't be quite so cynical
because the way AMD tested their CPU for this
could be leaving performance on the table.
Let me explain.
AMD has embraced the silicon lottery
with their new power management feature called determinism.
Wow, just gonna take a philosophy there.
Well, it comes into flavors, performance and power.
Oh, it is philosophy.
It's kind of like AMD's Precision Boost
found on their Ryzen chips
and allows you to bump up your performance within spec
if you have the thermal or power head room to do so.
In the performance determinism mode,
the CPU will target the maximum performance at a given TDP
with power varying to maintain stable performance.
Power determinism is flipped
with the CPU targeting the highest frequencies
while maintaining stable power draw.
While a consumer might want more performance at all times,
well, if you run servers that vary in load
having a constant power draw can actually improve efficiency
and reduce stress on the components
increasing the lifetime of your server.
Now, back to the graphs.
For these reported benchmarks,
AMD didn't use their determinism modes,
which means that customers could end up seeing
extra performance on their chips
should they decide to take advantage of this feature
and even without that extra edge
AMD still claims massive per core increases
over Intel's lineup promising as much as twice
the performance per core in high performance computing
which makes them an obvious choice for simulation workloads.
AMD has far faster cores which helps them win an HPC
and they have way more cores which gives them the upper hand
in virtualization in hyper scaling,
but here is the most damning comparison.
This performance per server chart,
AMD can fit the same number of cores in 60% fewer servers
using just half the power despite the extra socket draw.
At this point, Intel isn't even competing.
They're sitting on the bench,
but all this performance, of course,
means nothing if the price isn't right.
Is AMD leveraging their performance leadership
and charging through the nose?
Well, their flagship 9654
that I'm holding in my hand right here
is coming in at effectively 12,000 US dollars
which means the price per core remains virtually identical
to their Milan flagship,
but they are charging around a 10% premium
on most of the product stack compared to Zen 3,
which is a bit of a bump
considering customers are likely going to need
all new servers in addition to all new chips,
thanks to the socket change
and probably also all new RAM, it's gonna get pricing.
But with the ever increasing amount of computing
being done in the cloud,
I'm sure that major players like AWS and Google
will happily pay the premium
or just have their own CPUs like you do.
And what's coming in the future?
Well, we know that we'll be seeing
3D V-Cache versions of these chips
with the upcoming Genoa-X Lineup
and that the Bergamo Lineup
will max out at 128 cores on a single die.
While we've yet to see
what kind of upgrades Intel will bring with Sapphire Rapids,
it's clear that AMD isn't resting on its laurels,
employing every trick in the book
to maintain the massive growth
they've seen in the past couple of years in the servers base
and with the ever growing presence
and threat of arm-based servers,
it's going to be tough for Intel to keep up.
Now, just make me some non-pro Zen 4 red rippers
and I'll be really happy,
almost as happy as I am to tell you about our sponsor.
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- Thanks for watching, guys.
Obviously, we haven't had a chance
to put this guy through its paces yet,
but maybe if you wanna see some EPYC action
we have our holy (beep) on the EPYC Milan,
which was, wow, 2021?
How time flies.