AMD has officially launched its new Epyc server CPU family in a bid to take the fight directly to the top of Intel's highly profitable Xeon product lineup.
These processors are built on the same fundamental architecture as the company's Ryzen CPU cores, and they're designed for the incredibly powerful data center market. During the launch event, some of the world's biggest server manufacturers all announced support for the EPYC platform. These include ASUS, Dell, HPE, Gigabyte, Inventec, Lenovo, Supermicro, Tyan, Wistron, Microsoft, VMWare, and Red Hat.
As far as the specs go, performance benchmarks and memory features are also the supporting voices from software and hardware makers in the data center ecosystem. Epyc has the upper hand of any chip to hit the market in years at putting a crack in Intel's dominance. Analyst Matthew Ramsay at Canaccord Genuity stated that although he believes Intel's new server offerings (expected to be unveiled next month) to be "compelling," Ramsay expects "AMD has built the foundation to re-emerge as a solid competitor in the enterprise, cloud and storage tiers of the server market."
AMD's new Epyc 7000 series high-performance data center processors are packed up to 32 Zen' cores for performance and made up of nine 7000 processors. Each EPYC processor package can support up to 2TB of DDR4 RAM over eight channels and comes with 128 PCIe lanes. 2-socket EPYC also has 128 PCIe lanes.
AMD president and Lisa Su, AMD CEO said that "the processors will help the company deliver "industry-leading performance on critical enterprise, cloud, and machine intelligence workloads". With the Epyc series, AMD has focused closely on three core tenants: power, optimize, and secure.
