AMD put on quite the show with their recent Next Horizon conference, but they’re not content to rest on their laurels just yet. They have just announced a new addition to the EPYC 7000 series lineup, and it just show happens that this is their highest clock part to date.
The reveal of the server CPU was accompanied by a full press release, which stated that the EPYC 7231 is aimed at high frequency trading, design automation and various other server focused tasks that will happily gobble up that extra clock speeds.
So obviously we already know that they have managed to push this part to 3.8Ghz under some circumatances, what about the rest of the specs? Well, there’s the aforementioned 16 cores, and 32 threads – naturally. The CPU also boasts 64MB of L3 cache.
You undoubtedly noticed my use of “under some circumstances” there, and that’s due to the base clock coming in at 3.1Ghz, the boost on 16 cores at 3.6Ghz and the 3.8Ghz being achievable on 8 cores. We also see support for 8 channel memory and up to 128 PCIe lanes.
Mark Papermaster, senior vice president and chief technology officer at AMD, had this to say in their press release; “It’s been a fantastic year in the supercomputing space as we further expanded the ecosystem for AMD EPYC processors, while securing multiple wins that leverage the benefits AMD EPYC processors have on HPC workloads. As the HPC industry approaches exascale systems, we’re at the beginning of a new era of heterogenous compute that requires a combination of CPU, GPU and software that only AMD can deliver. We’re excited to have fantastic customers leading the charge with our Radeon Instinct™ accelerators, AMD EPYC processors and the ROCm open software platform.”
AMD are currently planning for this chip to be available for purchase in Q1 2019, which is before the release of the Zen 2 EPYC ROME parts, but sadly they were tight lipped when it came to the actual price.