AMD, together with Intel, is one of the major processor manufacturers known in today’s market. However, for many years it occupied the position number 2 when compared to its counterpart, Intel. Nevertheless, a few years ago AMD started winning the ground with processors that demonstrate even better performance, lower power consumption, and for lower prices. Namely, the AMD EPYC line which is based on the Zen processor microarchitecture. Today we are going to have a look at the evolution of this processor and its distinctive features in order to understand, how it has and will change the market in the future.
The evolvement of AMD EPYC processors
EPYC is a brand of microprocessors introduced by AMD in 2017. The processors are aimed at the application on dedicated hosting server, so they have certain technical adjustments to better suit this task. They generally support more cores and more CPU, which makes them suitable for resources intensive enterprise-level solutions, like virtualization and others..
EPYC processors are based on the Zen infrastructure, which is the most up-to-date AMD infrastructure and is still being further developed. AMD has been on a journey with its EPYC CPUs, starting with Zen1 and continuing through to the upcoming Zen4. Each new generation has brought significant improvements in performance and functionality, cementing AMD’s place as a major player in the CPU market.
Zen1 was the first generation of processor microarchitucture introduced withing the framework of Zen line. It was a huge leap forward for AMD, offering competitive performance to Intel’s CPUs, which were dominating on the market for the most part of history, offering the support of more CPU cores, RAM, and more efficient energy consumption, while being significantly cheaper. This set the stage for the battle between AMD and Intel that we’re still seeing today.
Zen2 brought even more improvements, increasing performance while also adding support for PCIe 4.0 and 8-channel DDR4 memory. This made AMD’s EPYC CPUs even more attractive to potential customers.
Zen3 is the previous generation of EPYC CPUs, and it brings even more performance gains while also adding support for the new SATA Express standard. This generation has also seen AMD’s CPUs gain significant market share, as more and more companies are turning to AMD for their server needs.
Zen4 is the architecture that was introduced most recently, offering a significant increase in performance compared to the predecessors, presented by both previous Zen-generations as well as by AMDs Xeon processors. The new microprocessor generation was introduced in the recent months, featuring the following characteristics: up to 96 TSMC 5nm Zen 4 cores, 12 channels of DDR5 memory and up to 160 lanes of PCIe Gen5. AMD is continuing to push the envelope with its EPYC CPUs, and it is clear that they are here to stay.
The general features of AMD EPYC processors
The AMD EPYC processor offers a unique combination of high performance, low power consumption, and a versatile feature set. EPYC processors are designed with an emphasis on scalability, making them ideal for use in servers and other high-performance computing applications.
EPYC processors up to 94 cores and 192 threads, providing an incredible amount of processing power. They also support up to 2TB of memory and 160 PCIe lanes, making them capable of supporting a wide range of devices and peripherals.
The power efficiency is another important parameters of a good server infrastructure, since power consumptions is one of the main components that make up the hosting costs. EPYC processors are also designed with power efficiency in mind, featuring up to 360W of power consumption. This makes them ideal for use in data centers and other power-sensitive applications, making your business not only more profitable, but also more sustainable in long term prospective.
All this makes AMD EPYC processor a powerful and versatile option for a wide range of high-performance computing applications.
How AMD EPYC Zen processors are going to change the market?
As you have already probably understood, the introduction of AMD EPYC Zen processors has been a bit of a change in the market of server microprocessors. For the first time a many years they offered a solution with more capacities for lower price tag then competitors do, starting to win more and more new customers.
If we, for example, have a look at the situation on the server market that was present before the recent introduction of the new generation of microprocessors by AMD, there was a noticeable lack of cores, with Intel Platinum with up to 40 cores and AMD with 64 cores. As cores play an especially significant role in building up efficient server solution meeting the modern day challenges, the has become the main accent in the development of new AMDs processors with impressive number of 96 cores, leaving the current Intel solutions far behind. Albeit this level of performance seems hard to superate, the new generation of Inter processors ist still to be released early in 2023. The question, who wlll dominate the server microprocessor market in the years to come remains open, but we can definitely say that the rapid advancing of AMD has greatly stimulated the market competition.
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