AMD EPYC Rome is expected to launch in the third quarter of 2019. The second generation server processors which have been codenamed "Rome" include up to 64 “Zen 2” cores (128 threads), increased instructions-per-cycle and leadership compute, I/O and memory bandwidth, according to AMD. AMD is very clear about their plans for Rome, they're making a direct assault on the data center, where Intel's architecture reigns supreme.
AMD EPYC Rome is expected to launch in the third quarter of 2019. The second generation server processors which have been codenamed "Rome" include up to 64 “Zen 2” cores (128 threads), increased instructions-per-cycle and leadership compute, I/O and memory bandwidth, according to AMD. AMD is very clear about their plans for Rome, they're making a direct assault on the data center, where Intel's architecture reigns supreme. AMD EPYC CPUs have had some big wins lately, Oracle and Amazon have both launched EPYC-based cloud instances.
AMD EYPC Rome Performance
EPYC Rome will be the industry’s first PCIe 4.0-capable x86 server processor. As such, Rome offers double the bandwidth per channel. This is critical to unlock the performance pf PCIe attached devices like FPGAs, GPUs and flash storage. AMD Rome also offers double the compute performance per socket, and four times the floating point performance per socket compared to current AMD EPYC processors. Rome will of course support AMD's own acceleration products like the Radeon Instinct MI60 processor which is designed to accelerate image recognition. Second generation EPYC will also support up to 4TB of DDR4-2933 DRAM.
AMD has produced a little bit of additional performance data, with the potential of Rome speed on display. AMD demonstrated a pre-production single-socket AMD EPYC Rome processor outperforming a commercially available top-of-the-line Intel dual-processor Xeon server running the CPU-heavy “C-Ray” benchmark.
Recently at Computex in Taipei, AMD showed off the NAMD Apo1 v2.12 benchmark results where the second generation Epyc CPU showed a larger than 2X performance boost compared to Intel Xeon-powered servers. While performance has yet to be independently validated, Rome has tremendous potential to be disruptive in the data center.
AMD EYPC Rome Upgrade
Rome offers socket compatibility with current generation AMD EPYC server platforms. Rome will also be forward compatible with third generation EPYC, dubbed Milan.
AMD EYPC Rome Availability
Rome has been formally launched as off August 7th.
AMD EPYC Reviews
We review several servers from leading manufacturers. Recent EPYC-based server reviews are below. EPYC Rome-based server reviews should start being available in the coming months.