As AMD launches its new CPU core architecture, Zen 5, which we’ll first see in the company’s upcoming Ryzen 9000 series processors, 5th Gen Epyc naturally isn’t far behind. Sure enough, CEO Dr. Lisa Su was all too kind enough to give us a sneak peek at what AMD has in store for servers at Computex. It’s chockful of chiplets. It’s staggeringly speedy. It’s, well, Epyc.
Over the past several years, AMD has quickly established itself as a manufacturer of some of the best CPUs for data centres through its Epyc series. As Su proudly claims, the company now enjoys a 33% market share in Q1 2024, which is all the more impressive considering this was just 2% back in 2018. Now, though, it’s clear that AMD is keen to compound its growth further with 5th Gen Epyc processors, as they’ll be available to slot into server racks fairly imminently.
5th Gen AMD Epyc CPUs, codenamed ‘Turin’, will feature up to 192 Zen 5 cores and 384 threads. All of this goodness is spread across 13 chiplets, built with a mix 3nm and 6nm processes. Naturally, it supports the latest memory and I/O standards too. While such specifications will undoubtedly carry a high price, these chips will be backwards compatible with existing SP5 socket motherboards, pending a BIOS update.
The chips aren’t quite ready for prime time, but AMD did share some performance comparisons to the 64-core Intel Xeon 8592+. Running NAMD, a 128-core 5th Gen Epyc CPU was apparently able to run a 20 million atom model 3.1x faster than Team Blue’s best. Its AI inference chops are excellent too, with Epyc in a class of its own handling an Enterprise Llama 2-7B large language model (LLM).
AMD says we can expect 5th Gen Epyc CPUs to hit the market some time later this year. So, expect further details on SKUs and the like to be forthcoming.
For more Computex news, check out our rundown of AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series. We’ve also got the latest on Nvidia’s plans to use AI to predict the weather and how Project G-Assist could give us our own AI assistants for games.