AMD today claims to own the world’s first 7nm data center CPU. This offers not only higher IPCs and a significant increase in overall performance, but also improved security features in the recently announced EPYC CPU “Rome”.
The new Rome 7nm EPYC chip has 64 cores and 128 threads, twice the EPYC Naples CPU in 32 cores and 64 threads.
The roadmap for Zen began with the first design in 2016. The first one was a 14nm processor, while the Zen+ update reduced it to 12nm. The next jump with Zen 2 is much bigger and reduces the node to 7nm. While the competition with their existing 14nm product line has difficulties meeting the production requirements, AMD has already officially announced the new 7nm EPYC processors based on the Zen 2 core.
Safety is also an inescapable issue for AMD. Especially with regard to Intel’s problems with Spectre and Meltdown. Rome CPUs already have hardware security patches for Spectre. In addition, AMD has increased the number of encryption keys for virtualizations to increase support for virtual machines.
25% more performance and less power consumption
Thanks to the node reduction, energy consumption would have been halved and performance increased by 25% compared to the current generation of Naples processors.
It is commented that the 7nm node will continue to be used in the next-generation Zen-3-based EPYC processors due to arrive in 2020.