AMD's status as scrappy underdog trailing in Intel's wake has been upended. The chipmaker has managed to pull out ahead of rival Intel with the launch of its fourth-generation Epyc "Genoa" processors this week.
The latest evolution of AMD's server platform not only boosts core counts to 96 and clock speeds as high as 4.4GHz, it also beats Intel's Sapphire Rapids to market as the first x86 CPU in the datacenter with support for the DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and Compute Express Link (CXL) standards.
The CPUs are based on the same Zen 4 microarchitecture and TSMC 5nm process nodes we saw in AMD's
Ryzen 7000-series desktop chips earlier this year. This, according to AMD Fellow and the creator of Zen, Mike Clark, contributes to a 14 percent instruction per clock (IPC) improvement over Zen 3.
However, the IPC gains are only part of the story. Combined with higher core counts and clock speeds, Ram Peddibhotla, AMD VP of Epyc product management, claims its flagship 96 core Epyc 4 CPUs are twice as fast as last year's 64-core Milan parts in a variety of cloud, high-performance compute (HPC), and enterprise benchmarks. As usual we recommend taking these claims with a healthy grain of salt.
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