AMD’s extended 3rd generation EPYC CPUs fill the “technology gap” left by the race for AI

AMD’s 3rd generation EPYC CPU portfolio has been extended with the addition of six new members of the family.

The new data center chips, listed below, are built on its Zen 3 core architecture and are optimized for price as well as delivering modern security features and “impressive energy efficiency”, the company claimed.

They also support up to eight channels of DDR4 memory, which is not the fastest on the market but once again is more cost effective.

“Today’s CIOs and IT decision makers leveraging aging data center infrastructure need a straightforward, seamless upgrade path toward next-generation technologies at a pace that meets their needs,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager of the server business unit at AMD. 

“We have seen a clear opportunity to give our customers more options that bring the leadership performance and efficiency of EPYC to less technically demanding but still business critical workloads. Servers powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs deliver impressive price-performance on widely deployed, cost effective and proven mainstream technologies,” he added.

The company gave two examples of customers that have recently implemented 3rd generation EPYC CPUs – Emirates NBD Bank, which deployed them on-premises and MonetaGo, which is making use of them through Google Cloud. This is despite the availability of the newer, more powerful – and more expensive – 4th generation family.

With the six new chips, which are listed below, the total number of available AMD EPYC CPUs runs to 29 different models, featuring between eight and 64 cores.

OEMs offering servers built with 3rd generation EPYC CPUs include Cisco, Dell Technologies, Gigabyte, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo and Supermicro. This is in addition to “trusted channel sellers”.

New 3rd generation AMD EPYC CPUs

• Epyc 7663P: 56 cores/112 threads, with a base clock of 2.0GHz and a boost clock of 3.5GHz, and TDP of 240W
• Epyc 7643P: 48 cores/96 threads, with a base clock of 2.3GHz and a boost clock of 3.6GHz
• Epyc 7303: 16 cores/32 threads, with a base clock of 2.4GHz and a boost clock of 3.4GHz
• Epyc 7303P: 16 cores/32 threads, with a base clock of 2.4GHz and a boost clock of 3.4GHz
• Epyc 7203: 8 cores/16 threads, with a base clock of 2.8GHz and a boost clock of 3.4GHz
• Epyc 7203P: 8 cores/16 threads, with a base clock of 2.8GHz and a boost clock of 3.4GHz