AMD is about to heat up the Enterprise market with their new flagship processor code named “Rome.” HP Enterprise and High-Performance Computer of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS) are collaborating together to build a next-generation supercomputer. The new supercomputer, named “Hawk,” will be the fastest supercomputer for industrial production and research. Hawk will be based on the AMD EPYC processor code named Rome and will have a theoretical peak performance of 24 PetaFLOPs. The new processors will use AMD’s Zen 2 architecture which is set to release in 2019.
AMD’s original Zen architecture was a major disruption on Intel’s server market last year and Intel is still struggling with getting their manufacturing process down to 7nm. Rome was revealed to be 7nm and have 64 cores which consist of eight 7nm chiplets, surrounding a large 14nm I/O die. The eight chiplets will have 8 cores each making a total of 64 cores and 128 threads.
Furthermore, details on the Hawk Supercomputer reveal more about the new AMD EPYC Rome. One of the slides from HLRS show a 2.35 GHz clock speed, how it was not revealed if this is the boost clock or the base clock. The current EPYC 7601 has a base clock of 2.2 GHz, a boost of 3.2 GHz on 1 core and 2.7 GHz all core. The Supercomputer will utilize 10,000 of the new EPYC processors bringing the total amount of cores to 640,000 and 24.06 PetaFLOPS.
Currently, the AMD EPYC 7601 is the fastest AMD server offering at $4000 and the Intel Xeon 8180 is the fastest Intel offers at $10,000. Nonetheless, the big gap in pricing is not correlated with a gap in performance. Intel barely manages a 10% performance gain over the AMD processor at more than twice the price. Intel has had a monopoly on pricing and market share over AMD for a long time but now with the new generation of AMD processors and pricing, it will be harder to justify purchasing an Intel CPU over an AMD.
As part of AMD’s preannouncement of the next generation EPYC processor’s, a few motherboards have been announced as well. Even though the new processor will be backwards compatible, it will be able to utilize PCIe 4.0 slots. These motherboards will also support the AMD Milan CPU’s coming out in 2020, allowing for servers to be easily upgradeable and giving a longer life to the hardware.
We have yet to see any actual details about benchmarks and specs of the AMD EPYC Rome so these speculations should taken with a grain of salt. As we near the date for the release of the new processor, AMD is sure to release more information. Stay tuned for more! We will update you as we learn of something new.
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