AMD EPYC 8005 Series Processors Launch with Zen 5 Architecture Addressing Edge Computing and Cloud Storage Efficiency Requirements
AMD has added new server processors, the EPYC 8005 series, to its enterprise silicon portfolio. These new CPUs are based on the Zen 5 architecture and have been designed, as reported in the official AMD technical announcement, to address the unique computation requirements posed by edge networks, telecommunications and dense cloud storage. The series is 1 socket designed, and is available in configurations from 8 84 cores with thermal design power from an efficient 70W to 225W.
The top of stack in the series is the EPYC 8635P, which sports 84 cores/168 threads. Hardware testing reports say that the top model has performance in integer calculation 40% greater than the 64 core model from the prior generation, while also having 9.5% better power efficiency per watt than the prior generation. Compared to the x86 alternatives, it more than doubles the core density found in the 40 core Intel Xeon 6716P B while also having a 10 watt lower thermal design power.
Testing within data centers finds the EPYC 8635P delivers 24,408 operations per watt, compared to 21,433 operations per watt delivered by the 72 core Intel Xeon 6 6776P B and 13,218 operations per watt delivered by the 144 core ARM based Nvidia Grace CPU Superchip. For system value in integer calculation per dollar the EPYC 8635P shows 48% better performance than the 72 core Intel counterpart in 1 socket server configuration.
The EPYC 8005 series of processors have been optimized for the harsh operating environment that is a telecommunications tower, are designed to tolerate broad thermal operating ranges and the processors allow for NEBS certified air cooled 1 socket deployments in outdoor enclosures. Hardware features of low density parity check will reduce latency through hardware assisted forward error correction, and allow more resources to be dedicated to virtualized RAN workloads. Samsung has successfully deployed its multi cell vRAN software on a single 84 core EPYC 8635P in a test where it handled 54 cell networks, reaching download and upload throughput of 9.5Gbits/sec and 2Gbits/sec respectively. According to Samsung's Michael Kim (VP vRAN software) this processor will reduce the amount of resources used by vRAN, accelerating industry shift to cloud native RAN software.
The thermal efficiency and compute density found in the EPYC 8005 series can support local artificial intelligence inference within the retail store environment. Will Kelso, President of WobotAI has verified his use of these CPUs in their video analytics agent running directly on a local, in store, server, negating the need for dedicated graphics processing units or cloud connected hardware and significantly reducing the total cost of ownership for a retail business. The EPYC 8005 processors support hardware with 96 PCIe Gen 5 lanes and 6 DDR5 6400 ECC channels up to 3TB in 1 socket server systems. This high level of I/O throughput, combined with a balanced architecture, is ideal for demanding, metadata intensive software defined storage arrays and solid state drive acceleration arrays. 1 socket systems with the EPYC 8635P have demonstrated ~1.23 times more CephFS RADOS throughput than previous generation EPYC 8534P, enabling providers of storage solutions to collapse multiple workloads into a single system node.
