To say that AMD is experiencing so much success these days is a massive understatement. They are closing in onto Intel's market share inch by inch, which has Team Blue on the run. And now, they just got tapped to power something seriously amazing.
Overclock3D reports that AMD has been contracted to provide their EPYC 7763 and 75F3 server chips to a supercomputer, which would be deployed at the National Supercomputing Center in Singapore. The gargantuan machine is going to serve as an upgrade to the center's current ASPIRE1, which apparently isn't "fast enough" anymore.
According to HPCWire, the supercomputer will be based on the HPE Cray EX, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and is planned to be operational by next year. As for the performance, it's on a completely different level: 10 petaFLOPS. Your high-end gaming computer with that 16-core Ryzen 9? It can only reach dual-digit teraFLOPS.
Only EPYC Performance Allowed
Truth be told, AMD is not just making waves in the consumer CPU market. Their datacenter sales are also booming despite the massive rippling effects of the pandemic. According to a report by MarketWatch, AMD's datacenter revenues jumped to a massive USD $1.35 billion from a mere USD $348 million. That's over quadruple the previous performance.
Here's another interesting tidbit about AMD's foray into server CPUs. It's been lately revealed that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (TSMC), one of the world's largest chipmakers, is actually using AMD EPYC processors to run their manufacturing processes. Chips making chips; now that's something amazing, isn't it?
Now, the EPYC line will help a supercomputer make billions upon billions of calculations that will advance science to a whole new level. A look at the chips being put into the NSCC's supercomputer says it all.
On the official website, AMD proudly refers to its EPYC 7763 CPU as the world's highest-performing server processor, exhibiting average performance gains of over 200% compared to competing Intel chips. That's frankly just insane. With up to a maximum of 64 cores and 128 threads per chip, EPYC processors are more than enough to help the NSCC's new machine crack the unknown secrets of biomedicine, diseases, climate, and beyond.
A Redemption Story Years In The Making
With this victory, AMD has gone a long way since the days of Piledriver and Bulldozer. Back in the early 2010s, Team Red was basically the laughingstock of the tech world. They couldn't beat Intel even if they tried, and even if they kind of did, they caused people's PCs to turn into impromptu space heaters (thanks, FX 9590).
But with the launch of Ryzen in 2017, things changed drastically. All of a sudden, Intel was no longer the undefeated king. AMD's insane gains in IPC and price-to-performance ratios had Team Blue reeling, which has been the situation until today. This was evident, especially in the most recent release of Intel Tiger Lake CPUs and AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors, a battle that the latter option won handily.
Furthermore, there are already plans for another die shrink with the imminent release of Zen 4 CPUs. Perhaps Intel's incoming Alder Lake chips with their big.LITTLE architecture will bring tight competition back, but experts and fans aren't really optimistic.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by RJ Pierce
