Dropbox, with its 500 million users and 300,000 business customers, becomes the latest in a long list of companies to see a future in embracing AMD's one-socket EPYC platform to support future growth and refresh its infrastructure to meet the compute workloads that the company faces.

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According to a blog post by Scott Aylor, AMD's CVP and GM of datacentre and embedded solutions, Dropbox will utilize AMD EPYC 7351P one-socket processor servers to "support future growth beyond its current capabilities and refresh its existing infrastructure for its most demanding compute workloads."

The EPYC 7351P is a 16-core/32-thread processor with a base speed of 2.5GHz and a boost frequency of 2.9GHz, and a TDP range of 155 to 170W.

Each EPYC processor package can support up to 2TB of DDR4 RAM over eight channels, and has 128 PCIe lanes means that the platform has more than two-and-a-half times the I/O density of a processor such as Intel's Xeon SP Series.

"AMD EPYC is a compelling processor option for our compute technology, providing Dropbox with the technical specifications required to support the workloads that matter to teams and our individual users," said Rami Aljamal, Head of Hardware Engineering and Supply Chain at Dropbox. "We are excited to deploy EPYC processors and look forward to working closely with AMD in the future."

EPYC, which launched in June of 2017, had a feature list was incredibly disruptive:

Up to 32 high-performance "Zen" cores

Single- and dual-socket support

Eight DDR4 channels per CPU

Up to 2TB RAM per CPU

Infinity Fabric for both die-to-die and socket-to-socket interconnect

128 PCIe lanes

Dedicated security subsystem, including Secure Memory Encryption (SME) specifically designed to protect virtual machines and containers from each other

Integrated chipset

Socket-compatible with next-gen EPYC processors

Processor pricing ranges from $400 to over $2,000 per chip.

One of the truly revolutionary things about EPYC was its single-socket capability. And not just single-socket, but what AMD called "the industry's first no-compromise one-socket solutions."

Prior to EPYC, if you were looking for a fully-featured, high-performance server in a single-socket configuration, you were out of luck.

Over the past twelve months EPYC has seen a huge number of wins across the server industry, both among server partners such as Dell and HPE, and from companies looking to benefit from the new silicon, companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo Japan, Packet, Baidu, Cisco, and Cray.

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