They had been expected for several weeks and today AMD has taken the wraps off its new processors EPYC 8004 Siena. These are CPUs that come in the brand new SP6 form factor, packing up to 64 core Zen 4c and feature a six-channel DDR5 memory subsystem. Siena EPYC processors are designed to server edge and communication systems that need to express advanced I/O performance and energy efficiency at the highest levels.
Edge servers are systems placed close to the end user or devices that require data processing. They are used to reduce latency and improve the responsiveness of applications and services. Their use is common in scenarios such asInternet of Things (IoT) and telecommunications networks. In fact, AMD offers these first EPYC Siena processors also for machines dedicated to data management network communications, including services such as voice calls, messages and data traffic. They can also be used for routing and data management within a network.
AMD spokespersons explain that the EPYC 8004 can be installed on platforms single socketin a package optimized to meet infrastructure needs with space and energy consumption constraints.
With the launch of the Siena processorsAMD completes the fourth generation EPYC portfolio: the offer includes CPUs for general purpose servers (Genoa), high performance computing (Genoa-X), cloud native (Bergamo) e Intelligent Edge (Siena).
EPYC 8004 Siena processors seen up close
The Siena processors, although based on the SP6 platform, reuse the main components of the CPU Bergamo for high-density servers, such as four 16-core Zen 4c chiplets. The processor itself can integrate 8 to 64 cores clocked at 2.0 to 3.10 GHz and a TDP between 80W and 200W. The processors can be configured to obtain a TDP of up to 225W or, vice versa, reduce this value up to 70W, with obvious benefits in terms of energy consumption.
Although the cores It was 4c of AMD are smaller and less power hungry than the Zen 4 cores, they support the same set of features as their “big brothers” and are therefore able to also run optimized applications, for example, for the use of instruction sets such as AVX-512.
AVX-512 focuses on the ability to perform operations on data vectors very large in size, i.e. 512 bits wide. Advanced vectorization is useful in applications that require high processing power, such as scientific computing, graphics,artificial intelligence e il machine learning.
The EPYC 9004 offer higher performance but in the case of the new 8004 series the company led by Lisa Su evidently did not want to focus on “brute force”, therefore on raw performances. The ones just presented are processors that don’t have to know how to do everything quickly so they aren’t exactly mainstream. Conversely, they are less expensive and optimize energy efficiency.
Performance per Watt compared to the competition
For AMD engineers, the EPYC 8004 Siena ensure performance per Watt up to 2 times better than competitors (Xeon Platinum 8490H, Xeon Platinum 8471N). As a reference, the benchmark SPECpower_ssj2008, focused on measuring the energy efficiency of servers in a real-world workload context (running server applications in Java). In the activities of video encodingan EPYC 8324P shows performance per core up to 1.16 times better than for example the 32-core Intel Xeon 6421N.
EPYC 8004 Siena CPUs support 96 lanes PCIe 5.0of which 48 are compatible with the CXL 1.1+ protocol to manage advanced accelerators (for inference in artificial intelligence or other applications) or memory expansions.
In addition to being approved on Microsoft Azure, the new CPUs are in the starting blocks on edge servers from Dell, Lenovo and Supermicro.
