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How the New EPYC CPUs Deliver System-on-Chip Electronics

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How the New EPYC CPUs Deliver System-on-Chip Electronics

CPU chipsets are not normally considered systems-on-chip (SoC) but the fourth generation of AMD EPYC processors incorporate numerous I/O functionality at a high level of integration.

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Typically, CPU chipsets are not normally considered systems-on-chip (SoC) but the fourth generation of AMD EPYC processors incorporate numerous I/O functionality at a high level of integration. Previous generations have delivered this functionality on external chipsets. The SoC design helps reduce power consumption, packaging costs and improve data throughput by reducing interconnection latencies.
 
The new EPYC processors have 12 DDR5 memory controllers – 50 percent more controllers than any other x86 CPU, which keeps up the higher memory demands of performance-intensive computing applications. As we mentioned in an earlier blog, these controllers also include inline encryption engines for supporting AMD’s Infinity Guard features, including support for an integrated security processor that establishes a secure root of trust and other security tasks.
 
They also include 128 or 160 lanes of PCIe Gen5 controllers, which also helps with higher I/O throughput of these more demanding applications. These support the same physical interfaces for Infinity fabric connectors and provide more remote memory access among CPUs at up to 36 GBps between servers. The new Zen 4 CPU cores can make use of one or two interfaces.
 
The PCIe Gen 5 I/O is supported in the I/O die with eight serializer/deserializer silicon controllers with one independent set of traces to support each port of 16 PCIe lanes.
 
 

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AMD’s Infinity Guard Selected by Google Cloud for Confidential Computing

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AMD’s Infinity Guard Selected by Google Cloud for Confidential Computing

Google Cloud has been working over the past several years with AMD on developing new on-chip security protocols. More on the release of the AMD EPYC™ 9004 series processors in this part three of a four-part series..

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Google Cloud has been working over the past several years with AMD on developing new on-chip security protocols that have seen further innovation with the release of the AMD EPYC™ 9004 series processors. These have a direct benefit for performance-intensive computing applications, particularly for supporting higher-density virtual machines (VMs) and using technologies that can protect data flows from leaving the confines of what Google calls confidential VMs as well as further isolating VM hypervisors. They offer a collection of N2D and C2D instances that support these confidential VMs.
 
“Product security is always our top focus,” said AMD CTO Mark Papermaster. “We are continuously investing and collaborating in the security of these technologies.” 
 
Royal Hansen, VP of engineering for Google Cloud said: “Our customers expect the most trustworthy computing experience on the planet. Google and AMD have a long history and a variety of relationships with the deepest experts on security and chip development. This was at the core of our going to market with AMD’s security solutions for datacenters.”
 
The two companies also worked together on this security analysis.
 
Called Infinity Guard collectively, the security technologies theyv'e been working on involve four initiatives:
 
1. Secure encrypted virtualization provides each VM with its own unique encryption key known only to the processor.
 
2. Secure nested paging complements this virtualization to protect each VM from any malicious hypervisor attacks and provide for an isolated and trusted environment.
 
3. AMD’s secure boot along with the Trusted Platform Module attestation of the confidential VMs happen every time a VM boots, ensuring its integrity and to mitigate any persistent threats.
 
4. AMD’s secure memory encryption and integration into the memory channels speed performance.
 
These technologies are combined and communicate using the AMD Infinity Fabric pathways to deliver breakthrough performance along with better secure communications.
 

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AMD Announces Fourth-Generation EPYC™ CPUs with the 9004 Series Processors

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AMD Announces Fourth-Generation EPYC™ CPUs with the 9004 Series Processors

AMD announces its fourth-generation EPYC™ CPUs. The new EPYC 9004 Series processors demonstrate advances in hybrid, multi-die architecture by decoupling core and I/O processes. Part 1 of 4.

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AMD very recently announced its fourth-generation EPYC™ CPUs.This generation will provide innovative solutions that can satisfy the most demanding performance-intensive computing requirements for cloud computing, AI and highly parallelized data analytic applications. The design decisions AMD made on this processor generation strirke a good balance among specificaitons, including higher CPU power and I/O performance, latency reductions and improvements in overall data throughput. This lets a single CPU socket address an increasingly larger world of complex workloads. 
 
The new AMD EPYC™ 9004 Series processors demonstrate advances in hybrid, multi-die architecture by decoupling core and I/O processes. The new chip dies support 12 DDR5 memory channels, doubling the I/O throughput of previous generations. The new CPUs also increase core counts from 64 cores in the previous EPYC 7003 chips to 96 cores in the new chips using 5-nanometer processes. The new generation of chips also increases the maximum memory capacity from 4TB of DDR4-3200 to 6TB of DDR5-4800 memory.
 
 
 
There are three major innovations evident in the AMD EPYC™ 9004 processor series:
  1. A  new hybrid multi-die chip architecture coupled with multi-processor server innovations and a new and more advanced Zen 4 instruction set along with support for an increase in dedicated L2 and shared L3 cache storage
  2. Security enhancements to AMD’s Infinity Guard
  3. Advances to system-on-chip designs that extend and enhance AMD Infinity switching fabric technology,
Taken together, the new AMD EPYC™ 9004 series processors can offer plenty of innovation and performance advantage. The new processors offer better performance per watt of power consumed and better per core performance, too.
 

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AMD’s Threadripper: Higher-Performance Computing from a Desktop Processor

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AMD’s Threadripper: Higher-Performance Computing from a Desktop Processor

The AMD Threadripper™ CPU may be a desktop processor, but desktop computing was never like this. The new chipset comes in a variety of multi-core versions, with a maximum of 64 cores running up to 128 threads, 256MB of L3 cache and 2TB of DDR 8-channel memory. The newest Threadrippers are built with AMD’s latest 7 nanometer dies.

 
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Content creators, designers, video animators and digital FX experts make much higher demands of their digital workstations than typical PC users. These disciplines often make use of heavily threaded applications such as Adobe After Effects, Unreal Engine or CAD apps such as Autodesk. What is needed is a corresponding increase in computing power to handle these applications.

 

That’s where one solution comes in handy for this type of power user: the AMD Ryzen Threadripper™ CPU, which now has a PRO 5000 update. One advantage of these newer chipsets is that they can fit on the same WRX80 motherboards that supported the earlier Threadripper series. There are other configurations, including the ProMagix HD150 workstation sold by Velocity Micro. The solution provider is looking at testing overclocking on both the MSI and Asrock motherboards that they will include in their HD150 workstations. That’s right, a chip that’s designed from the get-go to be overclocked. Benchmarks using sample apps (mentioned above) ran about twice as fast as on competitors’ less-capable hardware. (Supermicro offers the MI2SWA-TF motherboard with the Threadripper chipset.)

 

Desktop Was Never Like This

 

The AMD Threadripper™ CPU may be a desktop processor, but desktop computing was never like this. The new chipset comes in a variety of multi-core versions, with a maximum of 64 cores running up to 128 threads, 256MB of L3 cache and 2TB of DDR 8-channel memory. The newest Threadrippers are built with AMD’s latest 7 nanometer dies.

 

The Threadripper CPUs are not just fast but come with several built-in security features, including support for Zen 3 and Shadow Stack. Zen 3 is the overall name for a series of improvements to the AMD higher-end CPU line that have shown a 19% improvement in instructions per clock. And they have lower latency for double the cache delivery when compared to the earlier Zen 2 architecture chips.

 

These processors also support Microsoft’s Hardware-enforced Stack Protection to help detect and thwart control-flow attacks by checking the normal program stack against a secured hardware-stored copy. This helps to boot securely, protect the computer from firmware vulnerabilities, shield the operating system from attacks, and prevent unauthorized access to devices and data with advanced access controls and authentication systems.

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