



AMD's Zen architecture has proven to be a boon for the company in its fight against Intel. AMD first gave us a taste of how powerful Zen is with the Ryzen 7 processors, which were followed up by Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3. Later, we were taken by surprise with Ryzen Threadripper , which offers up to 16 cores of workstation-class computing greatness. Finally, AMD pulled the wraps off EPYC , which is a server-class processor family offering up to 32-cores and 64 threads of compute power.

It's that last product family that is the focus of our attention today. Canard PC Hardware, a French website with a pretty good track record when it comes to leaks, claims to have obtained specifications for AMD's second generation EPYC processors (we’ll simply call it EPYC 2 for brevity). At first glance, things don't appear to be too out of the ordinary. The processors are rumored to still support up to 128 PCIe lanes and 8-channel DDR4 memory (although the memory spec has been bumped from 2666MHz to 3200MHz speeds).

Ne le répétez à personne, mais les CPU EPYC de 2e gen d'AMD auront 64 cores, 256 Mo (!) de L3, 8x DDR4-3200 et 128 lignes de PCIe 4. 😲🤫 — Canard PC Hardware (@CPCHardware) October 31, 2017

Where things really get interesting is with the revelation that the maximum core count has increased from 32 cores to 64 cores. That means that the top-spec EPYC 2 part will be capable of executing a staggering 128 threads.

The final piece to the puzzle comes with respect to L3 cache, and this marks another significant upgrade. Current EPYC processors feature 2MB of L3 cache per core, with the current 32-core EPYC 7551P featuring 64MB of total L3 cache. The leak from Canard PC Hardware suggests that this figure will quadruple, with 64-core processors serving as home to 256MB of L3 cache.

If AMD can manage to move its 12nm LP process technology and eventually 7nm, it's not out of the realm of possibility that 64 cores and 256MB of L3 cache could be crammed into future EPYC processors. In a follow-up tweet, the publication says that base TDP for the new processor will be 225W and will max out at 240W.

N'allez pas non plus crier sur les toits que le TDP de base pourra monter à 225W (et jusqu'à 240W max). Je compte sur vous. — Canard PC Hardware (@CPCHardware) October 31, 2017

Back in March, the website managed to leak some news about an upcoming HEDT processor family from AMD. At the time, we didn't know that it had revealed specifications for what was to be known as Ryzen Threadripper. Will the publication's sources ring true again when it comes to these EPYC 2 specs? We definitely hope so.