Now that the Zen core is out of the gate in consumer systems aboard Ryzen CPUs , AMD is launching its fight to retake…
Now that the Zen core is out of the gate in consumer systems aboard Ryzen CPUs , AMD is launching its fight to retake data-center market share this morning with more details of the configurations and performance of its Naples server platform. The company is demonstrating Naples at the Open Compute Summit this week in Santa Clara, California.
Built around 32 of AMD’s Zen cores, each Naples CPU offers 64 threads of compute capacity, eight memory channels, and 128 PCI Express 3.0 lanes from each socket. AMD says that in a two-socket configuration, a Naples server will offer more cores, more memory capacity, higher memory frequencies, and more PCIe lanes than a competing two-socket Intel server built around a pair of 22-core Xeon E5-2699A v4 CPUs.
In a two-socket configuration, Naples CPUs will devote 128 of their lanes of collective PCIe connectivity to AMD’s Infinity Fabric interconnect. That still leaves 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes for connections to as many as 24 NVMe SSDs or other PCIe devices in a two-socket system. Among other benefits, AMD says the Infinity Fabric allows it to offer deterministic quality-of-service to VMs, establish roots of trust, perform secure boot operations, and more.
