As we approach the end of the year we have tremendous momentum and excitement building for AMD EPYC™ processors. Two weeks ago we were proud to have numerous partners with us at SC17 introducing EPYC to the HPC community. This week at HPE Discover, our teams will be showing off the latest EPYC-based system, the ProLiant DL385 Gen10 server.

With the new DL385, we’re once again partnering with HPE to bring AMD to the best-selling server in the industry, and this latest version is breaking records. An AMD EPYC model 7601-based HPE DL385 Gen10 system scored 257 on SPECrate®2017_fp_base and a 1980 on SPECfp®_rate2006, both of which are higher than any other two socket system score published by SPEC®. We’re extremely proud of this performance, which is a testament to our floating point implementation in Zen and HPE’s platform leadership. This week at HPE Discover, we are also showing how we are changing the economics of virtualization with EPYC in the heart of the server market, delivering up to 50% lower cost per VM.

EPYC is substantially lowering the total cost of ownership for the datacenter and giving customers a real choice for the first time in nearly a decade. Clearly this has many in the industry very excited. Even our competitor is taking notice.

A lot of our competitor’s angst around EPYC vs Xeon has been at the top of the performance envelope, which of course is very relevant for certain types of high-performance applications, but not critical for the vast majority of the server market today. Our teams have taken the great Zen core and built a highly differentiated part with unique memory, I/O, and security capabilities. Put it together and we have performance leadership for the workloads we’ve targeted. But beyond those workloads, in the middle of the performance stack, where most of the server business sits, EPYC has incredible performance advantages over Xeon Skylake scalable processors for the majority of applications.

Serve The Home recently showed some very compelling data focused at the heart of the server market. When testing our 16 core EPYC 7301 family, the data shows that in the highest volume portions of the market EPYC delivers more cores, more memory bandwidth and a significant performance advantage over the Xeon Silver product line across multiple benchmarks.

Our partners appreciate the choice and differentiation that EPYC provides to their solutions. In addition to the HPE, Sugon, Supermicro and other solutions we’ve already announced, we’re working with Dell and many other OEM/ODMs to bring their first EPYC-based platforms to market. Three of the Super 7 mega datacenter providers have publicly announced plans to deploy EPYC-based products, including Baidu, Microsoft Azure and Tencent, and we have strong engagements with other major cloud providers.

I’m extremely proud of the AMD team and the EPYC products they have created. With EPYC we are restoring choice and innovation to the server market. Stay tuned, because this is just the beginning of an exciting time for EPYC and new era of choice for the datacenter market. We’ll have more big news to share soon.

Forrest Norrod is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.