AMD unveils 5th Gen EPYC processors for AI & cloud use

AMD has officially released its 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors, named "Turin," designed for enterprise, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud applications in data centres.

The newly launched EPYC 9005 Series processors are built on AMD's "Zen 5" core architecture and extend the capabilities of previous CPUs with improved performance and energy efficiency, notably achieving 2.7 times the performance compared to rival offerings. The processors are available with core counts ranging from 8 to 192, with the flagship 192-core CPU delivering significant enhancements.

Among the new offerings is the AMD EPYC 9575F, a 64-core processor optimised for AI solutions reliant on GPU capabilities. This model is capable of boosting up to 5GHz, offering a 28% increase in processing speed over competitive alternatives.

"From powering the world's fastest supercomputers, to leading enterprises, to the largest Hyperscalers, AMD has earned the trust of customers who value demonstrated performance, innovation and energy efficiency," said Dan McNamara, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Server Business at AMD. "With five generations of on-time roadmap execution, AMD has proven it can meet the needs of the data centre market and give customers the standard for data centre performance, efficiency, solutions and capabilities for cloud, enterprise and AI workloads."

The EPYC 9005 Series promises improved performance metrics across various server workloads. The "Zen 5" core architecture introduces a 17% uplift in instructions per clock for enterprise and cloud workloads and 37% for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) tasks compared to previous generations.

Significant impacts are anticipated for customers using AMD EPYC 9965 processor-based servers when measured against servers using the Intel Xeon 8592+ CPU. Benefits include up to four times faster results for business applications like video transcoding, nearly four times faster insights for science and HPC applications, and a 1.6 times increase in performance per core within virtualised infrastructure.

In AI deployment, the new processors reportedly offer up to 3.7 times better performance on end-to-end AI workloads than competitors, particularly in generative AI models for small and medium enterprises.

By transitioning to data centres powered by these processors, organisations could achieve 391,000 units of SPECrate 2017_int_base computing performance while using an estimated 71% less power and around 87% fewer servers.

AMD expects that these processors will support existing platforms through partners such as Cisco, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and Supermicro. This compatibility provides ease of upgrade for organisations aiming to enhance their computing and AI capabilities.

The features of the new CPUs include options ranging from 8 to 192 cores, the introduction of "Zen 5" and "Zen 5c" architectures, 12 DDR5 memory channels per CPU, and support for up to DDR5-6400 MT/s. Boost frequencies can reach up to 5GHz, and security features include AVX-512 support and Trusted I/O for Confidential Computing, with FIPS certification processes underway.