AMD Previews 5th Gen EPYC With Up To 192 Cores Per Socket

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Previews 5th Gen EPYC With Up To 192 Cores Per Socket

In addition to all of the AMD client-side news during Lisa Su's keynote at Computex 2024 (see AMD Ryzen 9000 Series and AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series Mobile APUs), the AMD CEO also teased the upcoming 5th Gen EPYC processors. AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" processors are still on the way for releasing in H2'2024...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-5th-Gen-EPYC-Turin-192-Core

[sophisticles]

The 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors are built atop Zen 5 and will come in designs up to 192 cores / 384 threads per socket! Presumably the 192 core processors will be leveraging Zen 5C cores.

It's very "shocking" to see AMD choose to employ a "more cores" approach to increased performance; I don't think anyone could have seen that move coming.

Let's predict that the next release after this one will be 256C/512T per socket.

I do have one question, why the assumption that it is using 5C cores?

[pegasus]

why the assumption that it is using 5C cores?

One word: heat.

In related news, dust off your plumbing skills and get that water piping ready ... for all next gen silicon.

Basically vendors will have to start drawing lines on their SKU charts and splitting them in "DLC mandatory" and "DLC optional" sections. Air cooling will be left only for the poor ...

[stesmi]

It's very "shocking" to see AMD choose to employ a "more cores" approach to increased performance; I don't think anyone could have seen that move coming.

Let's predict that the next release after this one will be 256C/512T per socket.

I do have one question, why the assumption that it is using 5C cores?

Educated guesses.

The previous ones had 96-core Zen4 and 128-core Zen4c parts, so while it hasn't been said, it's a fair bet that the new 192-core parts will be Zen5c. The "c" cores are smaller than the regular ones, and the node change isn't enough to not make it even larger than today. 128 to 192 is a +50% diff, but 96 to 192 is +100%.

And as pegasus said, heat is one of the reasons they do that.

// Stefan

[raystriker]

It's also about consolidation. AMD has been trying to push for showcasing how these new high core count CPUs are much more efficient and performant than older Skylake (+- 1 or 2 gen) systems that are still in use and how you can replace racks of those with one of these. AMD needs all the business it can get while it struggles with keeping up with Nvidia on the AI/ML front.

[rabcor]

One word: heat.

In related news, dust off your plumbing skills and get that water piping ready ... for all next gen silicon.

Basically vendors will have to start drawing lines on their SKU charts and splitting them in "DLC mandatory" and "DLC optional" sections. Air cooling will be left only for the poor ...

water cooling is just air cooling with extra steps man, it's not actually better, traditional air coolers are just as good generally speaking.

Also this isn't a cpu, this is a supercomputer.

[pegasus]

water cooling is just air cooling with extra steps man, it's not actually better, traditional air coolers are just as good generally speaking.

Also this isn't a cpu, this is a supercomputer.

Ehm ... check the heat capacity of air vs water. And air is actually an insulator, it is a horrible heat transfer substance.
Also, supercomputers are my day job

[coder]

water cooling is just air cooling with extra steps man, it's not actually better, traditional air coolers are just as good generally speaking.

Um... no. Just no.

Also this isn't a cpu, this is a supercomputer.

It's intended for deployment in cloud & other sorts of datacenter environments. While there's some overlap between those and the HPC sector, supercomputers are distinguished by things like their prominent use of high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects, heavy reliance on GPUs, and a tiered storage system that can cope with frequent snapshotting.

Just because "OMG, so many corez!" doesn't automatically qualify something as a supercomputer or a component for one.

[nuetzel]

With NPU or without? - That's the question.

[coder]

With NPU or without? - That's the question.

No NPU. So far, AMD is only using those in their APUs.

The server equivalent is sort of their MI300A, which has both CPU and CDNA compute tiles.