AMD Chips Give Clouds, Data Centers EPYC Power

AMD announced its latest EPYC data center processors with support from cloud providers, server manufactures, and software providers including IBM Cloud, Microsoft, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), VMware, and others. The three processors, EPYC 7F32, EPYC 7F52, and EPYC 7F72, which have eight, 16, and 24 cores, respectively, are part of AMD’s second-generation EPYC chip family and target database, commercial high-performance computing (HPC), and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) workloads. AMD says the new additions make EPYC the “world’s highest per core performance x86 server CPU.” Based on AMD internal and external tests comparing its EPYC processors to Intel’s Xeon Gold and Xeon Platinum chips, AMD claims its new processors offer up to 17% higher SQL Server performance, HCI with up to 47% higher VMmark score (using VMware’s vSAN as the storage tier in a 4-node cluster), and commercial HPC with up to 94% higher per core computational fluid dynamics.