AMD announces EPYC Genoa-X and Siena CPUs with Turin roadmapped for 2024, advancing data center CPU portfolio.
AMD unveiled an ambitious server CPU roadmap at its Financial Analyst Day 2022, introducing the 4th-generation EPYC family alongside its first data center APU, the MI300X. The announcement encompassed multiple specialized variants targeting different markets: the general-purpose EPYC Genoa processors, the high-performance EPYC Genoa-X with 3D V-Cache, the cloud-optimized EPYC Bergamo, and the edge and telecommunications-focused EPYC Siena. All of these chips are built on Zen 4 microarchitecture and will drop into the same SP5 socket. AMD also teased the 5th-generation EPYC Turin chips, which are scheduled to launch before the end of 2024.
The EPYC Bergamo variant represents AMD's density-focused approach to cloud workloads, featuring up to 128 Zen 4c cores and 256 threads in a single socket. These Zen 4c cores are conceptually similar to efficiency cores found in other chip architectures, with certain unneeded functionality removed to improve compute density. Despite this streamlined design, the cores support the full Zen 4 ISA, with AMD maintaining AVX support unlike Intel's approach with Alder Lake.
AMD demonstrated a 96-core EPYC Genoa processor delivering a greater than 75% uplift over the current-generation EPYC flagship in a Java SPECjbb benchmark. This performance gain stems from the transition to the 5nm Zen 4 architecture combined with 12 channels of DDR5 memory, in addition to 32 additional cores compared to the previous generation. Genoa will support PCIe 5.0 and CXL-attached memory, such as Samsung's 512GB CXL memory Expander, and is on track for launch in the fourth quarter of this year. The Genoa-X variant comes armed with up to 1+ GB of L3 cache, featuring up to 96 cores while maintaining compatibility with the same socket as standard Genoa processors.
AMD is expanding into the telecommunications and edge markets with the Siena, a streamlined architecture offering up to 64 Zen 4 cores and optimized for power efficiency. This expansion broadens AMD's addressable market and represents a significant competitive advantage against Intel's offerings in these segments. Both Genoa-X and Siena are scheduled to arrive in 2023.
The MI300 represents AMD's entry into the data center APU market, combining Zen 4 CPU cores with CDNA 3 GPU cores on the same chip package at 5nm. Built using 4th-generation AMD Infinity Architecture to create a coherent memory interface between CPU and GPU components, the MI300 employs 3D packaging technology integrating CPU, GPU, cache, and HBM. AMD claims the accelerator provides up to an 8X performance increase in AI workloads compared to the MI250X.