AMD Zen 5 Status Report: EPYC "Turin" Is Sampling, Silicon Looking Great
by Anton Shilov on May 1, 2024 6:00 PM EST
As part of AMD's Q1'2024 earnings announcement this week, the company is offering a brief status update on some of their future products set to launch later this year. Most important among these is an update on their Zen 5 CPU architecture, which is expected to launch for both client and server products later this year.
Highlighting their progress so far, AMD is confirming that EPYC "Turin" processors have begun sampling, and that these early runs of AMD's next-gen datacenter chips are meeting the company's expectations.
"Looking ahead, we are very excited about our next-gen Turin family of EPYC processors featuring our Zen 5 core," said Lisa Su, chief executive officer of AMD, at the conference call with analysts and investors (via SeekingAlpha). "We are widely sampling Turin, and the silicon is looking great. In the cloud, the significant performance and efficiency increases of Turin position us well to capture an even larger share of both first and third-party workloads."
Overall, it looks like AMD is on-track to solidify its position, and perhaps even increase its datacenter market share with its EPYC Turin processors. According to AMD, the company's server partners are developing a 30% larger number of designs for Turin than they did Genoa. This underscores how AMD's partners are preparing for even more market share growth on the back of AMD's ongoing success, not to mention the improved performance and power efficiency that the Zen 5 architecture should offer.
"In addition, there are 30% more Turin platforms in development from our server partners, compared to 4th Generation EPYC platforms, increasing our enterprise and with new solutions optimized for additional workloads," Su said. "Turin remains on track to launch later this year."
AMD's EPYC 'Turin' processors will be drop-in compatible with existing SP5 platforms (i.e., will come in an LGA 6096 package), which will facilitate its faster ramp and adoption of the platform both by cloud giants and server makers. In addition, AMD's next-generation EPYC CPUs are expected to feature more than 96 cores and a more versatile memory subsystem.
Source: AMD Q1'24 Earnings Call (via SeekingAlpha)
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name99 - Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - link
"increase its datacenter market share with its EPYC Turin processors"Or increase its x86 datacenter market share?
That's the question, isn't it...
AMZ, Google, Meta, MS, nVidia Grace, Ampere, ... Reply
Dante Verizon - Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - link
ARM is of limited use.Even Nvidia's gigantic chip suffers against EPYC Reply
autarchprinceps - Thursday, May 2, 2024 - link
Not really true. It is growing quicker than x86 and therefore gaining market share, no matter what you think about it. It of course always depends, but if your use case is not highly reliant on the absolut newest and fastest vector extensions, most Neoverse based ARM chips are more efficient at giving you performance, which is ultimately what matters for most cloud/ecommerce/webserver like use cases. I doubt you've had a chance to actually test Nvidia Grace, since nobody outside Nvidia has, so we'll have to see there. It is of course possible to design an ARM chip with even more vector focus. Probably something more the Japanese providers would be doing for HPC though. As Apple has shown even maximum single core performance is possible, it's just not what scale out optimized Linux webserver style deployments actually need. ReplyET - Thursday, May 2, 2024 - link
Just wanted to say that quite a few people outside of NVIDIA have tested Grace. I tested Grace Hopper, and I don't have any special connections. ReplyDante Verizon - Thursday, May 2, 2024 - link
I'll tell you a secret, these companies making ARM chips trying to venture into the server market aren't even making a profit to pay back their investors. ARM has its uses, but it can't compete with x86 in the general market.https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-gh200-amd-t... Reply
deltaFx2 - Thursday, May 2, 2024 - link
It's easy to grow faster than x86 when you are 0% of the market. Almost all of that growth has been driven by AWS, which has committed to ARM more than anyone else. Depending on whom you ask, it's around 15%-20% of AWS's server fleet. The rest are just testing the waters. It does fill a need for I/O bound workloads, networking/storage. The 'good enough performance' sweet spot at decent power. For stronger single threaded performance, x86 still wins. AMD bergamo is an attempt at addressing that sweet spot of high throughput at lower TDP. Intel Sierra Forest is coming soon to attack that market. Ultimately, TCO matters: if the x86 vendors deliver more TCO, they win. If not, ARM wins. ReplySamus - Tuesday, May 7, 2024 - link
The advantage nVidia has over AMD is footprint. You can have far more CUDA-capable SoC's in the same amount of space as EPYC offers, while the TDP's are negligible (though a relevant consideration at scale, regardless of density advantage.)What I don't get is how investors are only blowing up nVidia stock while AMD has a competitive product. Reply
Blastdoor - Thursday, May 2, 2024 - link
Or maybe the question is whether the world needs a fabless x86 chip design company at all? Intel always made x86 competitive by virtue of superior manufacturing. When intel badly stumbled, allowing TSMC to take the manufacturing lead, there was a window for AMD to beat everyone with high performance designs on TSMC’s process.But now we are in a world where apple has shown high performance ARM designs are possible, at lower power, and the big firms are all designing their own. Meanwhile, Intel might actually regain the process lead. So why buy x86 from AMD when you could design your own ARM chip on the same process or buy a better x86 from Intel? Or pay intel to fab your ARM design?
Maybe real men own fabs after all. Reply
ET - Thursday, May 2, 2024 - link
An actual CPU you can use is infinitely more performant than one of paper. ReplyDante Verizon - Thursday, May 2, 2024 - link
Do you have the nerve to say that with intel sinking into debt it can't be profitable or competitive with TSMC? lol Reply