AMD to Launch 3rd Generation EPYC on March 15th: Milan with Zen 3
by Dr. Ian Cutress on March 8, 2021 9:45 AM EST
We’ve known for a while that AMD was set to launch its next generation enterprise EPYC processor family, collectively known by its codename Milan, sometime in the first quarter of this year. Today AMD has put out a press release confirming the date and time of its online event – the launch of the new 7003 series processors will occur starting at 8am PT/11am ET on March 15, 2021.
The launch event will feature presentations from CEO Dr. Lisa Su, CTO Mark Papermaster, GM Enterprise and Embedded Solutions (EESC) Forrest Norrod, and GM Server Business Unit Dan McNamara. Leading data center partners and customers will also make an appearance.
To date we know that AMD’s Milan processor line will feature up to 64 Zen 3 cores, using a seemless transition from the Zen 2 EPYC Rome ecosystem with pin-compatible processors. Milan will also offer up to 128 PCIe lanes, eight channel memory, and dual socket configurations. If the desktop Zen 3-based processors are any measure, +19% IPC generational gains are expected with the new processor, despite main memory access likely remaining the same. We have questions on exact performance, frequencies and efficiency, but this launch date should showcase all the product specifications such that we will see where the solution sits compared to current market offerings.
AMD has provided some previous benchmarking numbers – at CES the company showcased weather prediction simulation code, with two new 32-core Milan processors up against two of Intel’s popular 28-core Xeon Gold 6258R units. In that first party demo, a six hour simulation showed that Milan was 46% faster in dual socket compute. Later we were shown a single socket comparison, where the difference rose to 68%. These were first party tests without any comparison system details, however we expect more data on the March 15th launch.
Questions will be asked about AMD’s ability to supply EPYC, given it currently has a squeeze on its supply chain for a number of products. We are aware that AMD has already been providing key customers with complete silicon, and also to add to this, Dr. Lisa Su has stated that one of AMD’s key targets for 2021 is going to be the enterprise market.
We will be live blogging AMD’s launch – it can also be found online at the AMD events website.
Related Reading
- AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su: Interview on 2021 Demand, Supply, Tariffs, Xilinx, and EPYC
- AMD Previews 3rd Gen EPYC ‘Milan’ Performance
- AMD EPYC Rome in (Deep) Mini-ITX? ASRock Rack's New ROMED4ID-2T
- Google’s new Confidential Virtual Machines on 2nd Gen AMD EPYC
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shabby - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Amd should just put "its faster, yes really" in all their slides now just to troll intel.Smell This - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Being that vendors have "already been providing key customers with complete silicon" it is trolling enough. When 'The Doctor' and her team says, "AMD’s key targets for 2021 is going to be the enterprise market" I doubt she was whistling 'Battle Hymm of the Republic'
I'm thinking they know well what they have ... no reason to spike the ball in Chipzillah's face!
Samus - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
I caught that too. AMD basically saying "we are actually delivering products."robbro9 - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Seriously, you will know they have really arrived when they only compare it to their own prior offerings, completely ignoring any "competition"...zamroni - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Amd should have postponed rdna 2. The coincidence of new xbox and playstation release is too much for tsmcKevin G - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
7 nm orders are made well in advance so TSMC knew how much incoming demand they had. The likely problem is that AMD et al. didn't predict the surge in demand for their products and have been requesting more than what they initially ordered.Interestingly enough, the Xbox chip likely can be migrated to a different foundry. MS negotiated this in previous console generations and switched suppliers in the middle of that generation with little fan fair. Dual sourcing now would help in that angle but I suspect that other parts like GDDR6 are also in tight supply. Doubling SoC supply won't help if you can't source twice as many GDDR6 chips.
Smell This - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
"Amd should have postponed rdna 2. The coincidence of new xbox and playstation release is too much for tsmc" he said without a bit of irony, with the new 6700 XT due for release this month, new enterprise offerings, and "AMD’s CDNA GPU compute-focused architecture for data center" on tap.
( eye roll )
Samus - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
While AMD obviously makes more per sale on CPU's, their game console APU contracts are still incredibly valuable and execution is everything for their partner relationships.If they were unable to deliver Zen2+RDNA2 on time (and especially if they intentionally postponed it to pad sales in other segments) it would have been self-destructive toward future console contracts...there is likely a solid reason AMD is 3-4 generations into console hardware and everybody but Nintendo has been a repeat customer for many generations (though Nintendo's relationship was technically with ATI, not AMD)
frbeckenbauer - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
it would be really interesting to see what kind of numbers of these CPUs AMD has pumped out so farKevin G - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
I thought Millan would offer 129 PCIe lanes: Rome added a dedicate lane for various management tasks like IPMI so it wouldn't hamper bandwidth else where.