AMD Unveils Upcoming 7 nm Compute and Graphics Product Portfolio for the Data Center
IT News Online
2018-11-07 Mumbai -- IT News Online -- AMD at its Next Horizon event in San Francisco detailed its upcoming 7 nm compute and graphics product portfolio designed to extend the capabilities of the modern data center. During the event, AMD shared new specifics on its upcoming "Zen 2" processor core architecture, detailed its chiplet-based x86 CPU design, launched the 7 nm AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 graphics accelerator and provided the first public demonstration of its next-generation 7 nm EPYC server processor codenamed "Rome".
Amazon Web Services (AWS) joined AMD at the event to announce the availability of three of its popular instance families on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) powered by the AMD EPYC processor.
"The multi-year investments we have made in our data center hardware and software roadmaps are driving growing adoption of our CPUs and GPUs across cloud, enterprise and HPC customers," said Dr. Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. "We are well positioned to accelerate our momentum as we introduce the industry's broadest, most powerful portfolio of data center CPUs and GPUs featuring industry-leading 7 nm process technology over the coming quarters."
AMD Compute Architecture Updates
AMD for the first time detailed its upcoming "Zen 2" high-performance x86 CPU processor core that is the result of a new modular design methodology. This modular system design uses an enhanced version of AMD Infinity Fabric interconnect to link separate pieces of silicon (chiplets) within a single processor package. The multi-chip processor uses 7 nm process technology for the "Zen 2" CPU cores that benefit from the advanced process technology, while leveraging a mature 14 nm process technology for the input/output portion of the chip. The result is much higher performance, more CPU cores at the same power, and more cost-effective manufacture than traditional monolithic chip designs.
Combining this breakthrough design methodology with the benefits of TSMC's 7 nm process technology, "Zen 2" delivers significant performance, power consumption and density generational improvements that can help reduce datacenter operating costs, carbon footprint and cooling requirements.
Other key generational advances over the "Zen" core include:
- An improved execution pipeline, feeding its compute engines more efficiently.
- Front-end advances: improved branch predictor, better instruction pre-fetching, re-optimized instruction cache and larger op cache.
- Floating point enhancements: doubled floating point width to 256-bit and load/store bandwidth, increased dispatch/retire bandwidth and maintained high throughput for all modes.
- Advanced security features: hardware-enhanced Spectre mitigations, taking software migration and hardening it into the design, and increased flexibility of memory encryption.
Multiple 7 nm-based AMD products are now in development, including next-generation AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs, both of which AMD detailed and demonstrated at the event. Additionally, the company shared that its follow-on 7 nm+-based "Zen 3" and "Zen 4" x86 core architectures are on-track.
AMD EPYC Server CPU Updates
Reinforcing the growing momentum achieved with its current-generation AMD EPYC processors, Matt Garman, vice president of compute services at AWS joined AMD on-stage at the event to announce the immediate availability of the first AMD EPYC processor-based instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Part of AWS' popular instance families, the new AMD EPYC processor-powered offerings feature industry-leading core density and memory bandwidth. This results in exceptional performance-per-dollar for general purpose and memory-optimized workloads, driven by the core density of AMD EPYC processors that offer M5a and T3a customers a balance of compute, memory and networking resources for web and application servers, backend servers for enterprise applications, and test/development environments with seamless application migration. For R5a customers, the memory bandwidth advantage of AMD EPYC processors is ideal for in-memory processing, data mining and dynamic data processing.
AMD also disclosed new details and delivered performance previews of its next-generation EPYC processors codenamed "Rome":
- Processor enhancements including up to 64 "Zen 2" cores, increased instructions-per-cycle and leadership compute, I/O and memory bandwidth.
- Platform enhancements including the industry's first PCIe 4.0-capable x86 server processor with double the bandwidth per channel to dramatically improve data center accelerator performance.
- Double the compute performance per socket and four times the floating point performance per socket compared to current AMD EPYC processors.
- Socket compatibility with today's AMD EPYC server platforms.
AMD demonstrated the performance and platform advantages of its next-generation EPYC processor with two demos during the event:
- A pre-production single-socket next-generation AMD EPYC processor outperforming a commercially available top-of-the-line Intel dual processor Xeon server running the computationally-intensive, industry standard "C-Ray" benchmark.
- The industry's first x86 PCIe 4.0-capable platform demo, featuring a Radeon Instinct MI60 processor to accelerate image recognition.
"Rome" is sampling with customers now and is expected to be the world's first high-performance x86 7 nm CPU.
AMD Data Center Graphics Updates
AMD launched the world's first 7 nm GPUs and the industry's only hardware-virtualized GPUs, the AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50, which are scheduled to ship to customers this quarter. These new graphics cards are based on the high-performance, flexible "Vega" architecture and are specifically designed for machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), delivering higher levels of floating-point performance, greater efficiencies and new features for data center deployments. A live demonstration during the event showed the flagship AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 running real-time training, inference and image classification.
In addition to new hardware announcements AMD also announced ROCm 2.0, a new version of its open software platform for accelerated computing that includes new math libraries, broader software framework support and optimized deep learning operations. ROCm 2.0 has also been upstreamed for Linux kernel distributions, extending ROCm access to millions of Linux developers and users. Designed for scale, ROCm allows customers to deploy high-performance, energy-efficient heterogeneous computing systems in an open environment.
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