AMD launches 2nd Gen Epyc server chips, claims they are faster and less expensive than Intel

Google to cut Google Cloud prices after deploying AMD Epyc in server farms

AMD has launched its second generation Epyc family of processors, claiming that they are better in terms of both price and performance compared to Intel.

The company held a launch event in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday afternoon, where it was joined by a number of its data-centre partners and customers, indicating their interest in adopting Epyc for their global server farms. These partners included Google and Twitter, on the user side, and HPE and Lenovo, on the server manufacturing side.

"Today, we set a new standard for the modern data centre with the launch of our second-gen AMD Epyc processors that deliver record-setting performance and significantly lower total cost of ownership across a broad set of workloads," said AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su.

"Adoption of our new leadership server processors is accelerating with multiple new enterprise, cloud and HPC customers choosing Epyc processors to meet their most demanding server computing needs," Su added.

At the high-end - there are 19 SKUs in all - the Epyc 7742 sports 64 cores and 128 threads, with a base clocks speed of 2.25GHz and a boost speed of 3.40GHz, supported by 256MB of L3 cache, all in a 225W thermal design power package. The Zen 2 Epyc CPUs will be the first mainstream data centre microprocessors built using 7-nanometre technique. The chips will be made by TSMC.

Su also claimed that the Epyc server chips will cost around half the price of comparable Intel offerings.

Indeed, AMD claims that the top-of-the-line new Epyc, which comes with a price tag of less than $7,000, offers better performance than Intel's Xeon 8280M, which has a list price of $13,012. The eight-core, 16-thread Epyc 7232P, meanwhile, will cost a more modest $450.

AMD's 2nd Gen Epyc 7000 Series processors, code-named "Rome" come two years after the company launched its first-generation Epyc processors. While well received, they arguably failed to make much of a dent in Intel's dominance the market for server microprocessors.

However, the announcement by Google that it has started deploying AMD's new Epyc processors in its data centres, and plans to use more Epyc CPUs in its server farms across the world ought to give AMD a big market boost.

Last month, it was reported that Google was considering a shift to AMD ' s Epyc server platform in the near future and that it was making its own server boards using AMD Epyc server CPUs.

Bart Sano, vice president of engineering at Google, said that Epyc is delivering "great performance" and that the company expects to cut costs for Google Cloud customers in the coming days as a result.

Twitter has also revealed plans to deploy second-gen Epyc chips across its data centre infrastructure later this year.

Lenovo added that it is launching new servers to take advantage of some of the enhanced capabilities bundled in the second-gen Epyc.

In May, leaked benchmarks of engineering samples of AMD's 32-core and 64-core Epyc CPUs indicated that the AMD's forthcoming new server CPUs could be among the most powerful ever produced.

Also in May, AMD launched its Ryzen 3000 PC CPUs to good reviews, while its Navi GPU technology has helped reduce the performance gap with Nvidia in the graphics card market.

Earlier this week, Su took to Twitter to deny rumours that she was grooming executive vice president of Computing and Graphics, Rick Bergman, as her successor, and that she was planning to shift to IBM to take over as CEO from Ginny Rometty.