AMD Epyc Milan server CPUs are "twice as fast" as Intel Xeon

AMD has unveiled its third-generation Epyc Milan data centre CPUs, which is claims are the "world's fastest" server processors.

The hardware, which is already available, is the first set of AMD chips for the server market to be built on the company's powerful 7-nanometer Zen 3 architecture.

AMD claims Epyc Milan produces twice the power of Intel's rival Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh chips in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads, and claims it offers a better price-to-performance ratio.

AMD's confidence comes from as a result of its Zen 3 architecture, which is a microarchitecture that has brought similar benefits with AMD's Ryzen 500 series of chips, which have become increasingly popular in the desktop PC space.

"With the launch of our 3rd Gen AMD Epyc processors, we are incredibly excited to deliver the fastest server CPU in the world. These processors extend our data centre leadership and help customers solve today's most complex IT challenges, while substantially growing our ecosystem," said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group.

"We not only double the performance over the competition in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads with our newest server CPUs but together with the AMD Instinct GPUs, we are breaking the exascale barrier in supercomputing and helping to tackle problems that have previously been beyond humanity's reach."

'Zen 3' refers to cores of which there are 64 within the 7003 series that is said to deliver up to twice the performance for HPC workloads compared to the competition. For cloud providers that need more computing power and security, the 7003 series has the "highest core density", according to AMD, and also includes AMD Infinity Guard protection.

Already, the AMD Epyc Milan series is being used by some of the biggest names in tech in a variety of ways. AWS will add it to its core Amazon EC2 instance families later this year, and it will also feature in Dell's new PowerEdge XE8545 server. Google Cloud will embed the EPYC 7003 series processors in a new compute optimised virtual machine and Microsoft has announced multiple virtual machine offerings that will be powered by the 7003 series.

Other uses cases include Lenovo, Oracle, HPE, VMware, Tencent and many more.