Just two months after introducing the Athlon, Athlon Pro and Ryzen Pro chipsets, AMD has unveiled its Zen 2 architecture based on a 7nm process built for processors powering PCs and server CPUs. Along with the new architecture, AMD the first ever GPU built on a 7nm FinFET process in the firm of the Radeon Instinct graphics.
At an event in San Fransisco, AMD revealed the Zen 2 architecture that will hit the market early next year and is built on a 7nm manufacturing process. The Zen 2 core architecture will be sold as Ryzen on desktops and notebooks while Servers with the same architecture will use Epyc processors codenamed ‘Rome’. Manufactured by TSMC, the 7nm chipsets will offer support to up to 64 cores with a modular chiplet style architecture, thus gaining an advantage over Intel’s chipsets.
The chiplets will consist of CPUs itself and will be packed with a 14nm I/O die. This will help the processors achieve a uniform memory Latency and provide support for eight DDR4 channels and PCIe 4.0 connectivity through 128 lanes. AMD has claimed that the Zen 2 architecture based chipsets will support 256-bit processing with better security and data Encryption with a 45 percent reduction in total cost of ownership of its Epyc based servers than its Intel counterparts.
AMD said that Amazon currently adopts its Epyc servers for its cloud offerings and these chipsets will be able to support to up to 96 virtual CPUs and up to 768GB of RAM.
As discussed earlier, the American chipset company also showed off its first 7nm graphics unit. The Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60 accelerators are aimed for cloud computing, machine learning and rendering at data centres. The GPUs support second-gen 3D stacked HBM2 memory and thus support faster neural network training. The graphics units also enable high-speed PCIe 4.0 connectivity and AMD’s Infinity Fabric Link through 6x faster GPU-to-GPU link.
The AMD 7nm Rome CPUs will be sold as early as 2019 and AMD has revealed plans for the Zen 3 architecture by 2020. The Radeon Instinct will be up for sale during the first quarter of 2019 as well.