AMD introduces “chiplets” to cope with the pace of Moore’s Law. AMD advances its new Zen architecture. Yesterday, the company announced its new line of processors for Rome EPYC servers, which includes up to 64 cores and 128 threads. This opens up the possibility for AMD business customers to equip a single double-socket motherboard with up to 128 cores and 256 threads.
AMD Epyc: 64-Core Processors for Servers
The new processors are based on AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture and feature a revolutionary new chip ecosystem with a 14nm I/O die in the centre of the processor surrounded by eight 7nm CPU chip modules. The chips are connected to the I/O die via AMD’s second generation Infinity Fabric architecture. Each chipplet has up to eight cores and 16 threads, making the eight a total of 64 cores.
How does the Chiplets design work?
The Rome EPYC processors are equipped with an eight-channel DDR4 memory controller that is now inside the I/O die itself. This enhanced design gives you a UMA architecture and each chiplet can access memory with the same latency. They are also the first processors to support the PCIe 4.0 standard and have up to 128 PCIe 4.0 lines, making them the ideal companion for the Instinct MI60 and MI50 accelerators with PCIe 4.0 x16 interface. However, AMD has not indicated whether the PCIe complex is inside the I/O die or not.
So the Rome EPYC processors contain up to nine silicone pads, and if the first generation EPYC was already impressed with their four pads, then they perform even better. Intel laughed that the EPYC consisted of four processors held together, AMD decided to fix the flaws of this design by adding even more modules to the processor, we’ll see the fact that Intel will have if it manages to overcome its monolithic Xeon.
AMD has not announced the prices and availability of the EPYC Rome line. However, processors are expected to be released in 2019, provided there are no major setbacks.