Tencent rolls out “Star Lake” server based on AMD EPYC

AMD today announced a partnership with Tencent, the largest data center operator in China, to provide EPYC processors to the Chinese company for its new Star Lake platform. It is easy to see that this is a great victory for AMD in the server market.

Star Lake is the dedicated implementation of Rome’s Tencent. According to Tencent, this custom design improves energy efficiency under maximum load by 50% through the use of “advanced thermosiphon heat dissipation technology”.

AMD has not indicated which EPYC CPU Tencent will use, but it could be the 7H12: the most powerful (and most efficient) EPYC processor. This would explain why improving cooling has such an impact on performance.

Especially in terms of performance, Tencent states that this change gave them 35% more performance than their previous servers. At an unspecified specific load, Tencent noted an improvement in the CPS rate (queries per second) of up to 150%.

According to Tencent, even more important is Rome’s ability to “meet 98% of Tencent’s cloud application scenarios. For AMD, it is very important that Rome can be so flexible, as Naples (and earlier Zen-based CPUs) were much faster than Xeon in some applications but much slower in others. Rome’s ability to basically meet all of Tencent’s needs is a big victory when you consider that the company operates China’s largest data center with 1.1 million servers.

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