HPE, Lenovo, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware, Dell Leverage AMD EPYC Genoa In New Products

As companies line up to take advantage of AMD’s new fourth-generation processors that promise huge cost savings over previous generations, AMD CEO Lisa Su promises large enterprise customers can ‘save millions of dollars’ by upgrading to EPYC Genoa.

AMD’s ability to combine powerful data center computing with energy savings is proving attractive as companies line up to add fourth-generation EPYC Genoa processors to their offerings.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based AMD launched its EPYC Genoa processor line Thursday at its “Together We Advance Data Centers” event in San Francisco. AMD Chair, President and CEO Lisa Su touted Capex and Opex efficiencies that could save companies millions of dollars in the coming years while reducing server footprint in the data center. The new chips achieve these feats with up to 96 cores to support high performance and high energy efficiency.

“At AMD, we’re all about pushing the envelope in high performance and adaptive computing to create solutions to the world’s most important challenges, whether you’re talking about the cloud or enterprise or 5G or networking, AI, automotive, PCs and much, much more. Today is all about EPYC,” Su told the audience.

Su focused much of her presentation on benchmarks that showed up to 2.9 times the processing power of competitors and power efficiency that offers substantial cost savings. Just five servers outfitted with Genoa can do the work of 15 of Intel’s currently available Xeon chips, she said. [Intel’s faster, more efficient Sapphire Rapids chip is expected to come in January]. “That’s dramatically less Capex and dramatically less Opex as well. And that leads to a 54 percent savings in energy costs. And if you scale this example to an enterprise running thousands of servers, you’re now seeing that you can save millions of dollars by upgrading to fourth-generation EPYC,” Su said.

AMD invited several executives from vendor partners, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware and Dell Technologies, to the event. CRN looks at what some of the top IT executives had to say about how they’ll use AMD’s latest EPYC data center offerings.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

HPE is launching six new ProLiant Gen11 server platforms using AMD’s EPYC Genoa processors. HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri said AMD’s new processor would bolster the company’s Green Lake cloud platform.

“As a market leader in hybrid cloud, we are committed to delivering greater choices and simplicity thorough the HPE Green Lake cloud platform, which supports most of the HPC innovation using the fourth- generation AMD EPYC processor,” Neri said.

“Customers can easily adopt cloud services with advanced performance while gaining critical capabilities in governance, security and visibility,” he said. “Our new products include new HPE ProLiant servers that offer enterprise customers a secrure and simplified cloud management experience with the workload-optimized performance to target a range of applications across edge AI, analytics and cloud-native.”

Neri said HPE is also supporting EPYC Genoa in its recently expanded supercomputing and AI portfolio. Earlier this year, AMD and HPE introduced the world’s first supercomputer to break the exascale performance barrier with Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Blue Frontier computer. Neri said this technology would be made available to enterprise customers to “advance problem design and accelerate innovation for organizations of all sizes.”

Lenovo

Lenovo Thursday launched 21 new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile V3 servers that will be powered by fourth-generation AMD EPYC processors as part of its Infrastructure Solutions V3 portfolio for HPC and AI workloads.

“Lenovo is enabling business transformation with edge-to-cloud server and storage solutions, helping customers harness the power of data,” Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager of server and storage, said in a statement. “Leveraging fourth-gen AMD EPYC processors’ breakthrough performance with Lenovo’s engineering innovation, we are providing our broadest enterprise portfolio, designed to hlp businesses across every industry accelerate IT modernization and achieve intelligent transformation.”

Kirk Skaugen, Lenovo’s executive vice president for the Infrastructure Solutions Group, made the trip to San Francisco for the AMD launch event. “It’s our largest portfolio on AMD ever,” he said. “We recognize that 75 percent of the data is moving to the edge. … We’re going to double the amount of data in the world in the next two to three years, which will be more data than has been created in the entire history of the world. As we get even lower-power versions of EPYC, you’re going to see us more together on the edge … in the future.”

Oracle

Oracle will offer new platforms to accommodate the new EPYC line.

Clay Magouyrk, Oracle’s executive vice president for cloud infrastructure, joined Su on stage during the event to talk about Oracle’s use of the new EPYC Genoa line. Magouyrk is the lead on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure and is responsible for product strategy, engineering, technical operations and customer success for the company’s enterprise-focused cloud infrastructure.

Oracle’s cloud business would benefit greatly from the high power and low energy consumption offered by EPYC Genoa, Magourky said. “We’re always very focused on how do we have the highest-performing system,” he told the audience. “What we see our customers doing is choosing the right processor for the job and many times, that’s EPYC, and the results speak for themselves.”

Magouyrk said EPYC will help Oracle offer superior “price for performance across the board” with HPC-optimized computing offering RDMA networking capability. “Genoa … brings with it things like DDR5 and CXL, which I think is going to be very impactful in the data center, especially in the cloud provider … to get better performance and lower cost.”

Microsoft

Microsoft Thursday unveiled two new HPC virtual machines that will be powered by fourth-generation EPYC Genoa processors—the all-new Azure HX series and fourth-generation Azure HB series virtual machine.

The HX series computer will feature 1.5 TB of ultra-low-latency memory and the new HBv4 series will deliver up to two and a half times the performance of its predecessor. These machines will automatically be upgraded to Genoa in the first half of 2023, the company said. These high-powered computers will be some of the first to offer 800 GBps of DDR5 memory bandwidth.

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president of cloud and artificial intelligence, joined Su on stage at the event to talk about AMD EPYC’s role in Microsoft Azure cloud products. “In these times of historic change and uncertainty, we recognize the cloud plays a key role in helping our customers do more with less and overcome the dynamic challenges they face,” he said.

VMware

VMware said that it has optimized its vSphere 8 software for EPYC Genoa processors.

VMware CEO Rangarajan Raghuram said the companies were working to deliver increased performance and lower power consumption for a greener data center. “This combination of vSphere and EPYC allows enterprises to realize hyper-optimized performance with the lowest TCO and energy consumption, all in pursuit of data center modernization for our customers,” he said in a video message during the AMD launch event.

“In addition to delivering the best virtualization performance, VMware and AMD continue our commitment to provide exceptional security solutions. … As an added bonus, we are contributing dramatically to lower power consumption in the data center.”

Dell

Arthur Lewis, president and COO of Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, joined AMD’s launch panel to talk about Dell’s cooperation with AMD in the data center and how EPYC will enhance the company’s offerings.

“Data is the currency of today, and it’s the currency of the future,” Lewis said. “And modern multi-cloud infrastructure is the manner by which customers will access and unlock the full value of their data.”

Dell is looking to leverage AMD’s newest EPYC processor to offer customers the ability to process data “efficiently, securely and sustainably,” Lewis said. “AMD, as you’ve seen today, with extremely strong innovation and performance and design, remains a compelling portion of our portfolio.”

Dell is already “seeing strong customer demand based on AMD EPYC Gen 4,” he added.

EPYC’s ability to offer lower power consumption is a big plus for Dell, which has increased its sustainability efforts in recent years. “For us, it’s no secret that sustainability is very top of mind for customers,” Lewis said. “And Dell obviously shares that priority. … We believe the latest generation of the AMD-based servers present one of the most compelling arguments for sustainable compute in the industry.”