SAN FRANCISCO — Advanced Micro Devices launched its first 7-nm CPU and GPU at the lucrative target of the data center. It showed working chips that delivered comparable performance to Intel’s 14-nm Xeon and Nvidia’s 12-nm Volta.

AMD has yet to reveal many details about the new chips and their performance. However, analysts are generally bullish that the company will be able to continue a significant comeback since it launched its first Zen-based chips on a 14-nm process in late 2016.

“We are all about high performance … The idea is to be incredibly ambitious and recognize it’s a journey,” said chief executive Lisa Su in a press and analyst event here. “AMD is totally committed to the data center. This is our space and this is where we will lead.”

She demonstrated a single 7-nm Epyc x86 processor narrowly beating a system with two Intel Skylake Xeons in a rendering job. Separately, AMD showed benchmarks that roughly put its 7-nm Vega GPU on par with an Nvidia V100 in inference tasks.

Startup Highwai showed the 7-nm Vega running its AI simulation software for robocar navigation. The AMD chip seemed roughly comparable to Volta GPUs that it has been developing its code on, said Raul Diaz, chief technologist and co-founder of the company.

“We haven’t had time to do any systematic comparisons yet,” he said, noting that AI training is the app most in need of more performance.

Epyc (left) and Vega both leverage multi-die packaging techniques. (Images: AMD)

The existing 14-nm Epyc, launched in May 2017, boosted AMD’s negligible 0.5% share of x86 servers to 1.5%. With its customer relationships now back on track, the 7-nm version could push AMD up to “high single digits” in x86 server market share by mid-2019, said Mario Morales of International Data Corp. (IDC).

To date, the Zen-based x86 chips have boosted AMD’s share of overall microprocessor units to 9.23% in the second quarter of this year, up from 7.43% in the second quarter of 2016, said Shane Rao of IDC. In revenue terms, AMD has seen its processor share grow to 5.3% from 2.64% over the same period, IDC estimated. Intel’s x86 continues to dominate all architectures across both categories at over 90%.

AMD continued its proactive use of creative packaging to deliver a lower-cost Epyc. A single module includes up to eight 7-nm processor die linked with AMD’s Infinity fabric to a single 14-nm I/O chip with memory controller. The approach is an extension of the 14-nm Epyc that uses four die on a single package.

“One big die [for the 14-nm Epyc] would have cost 1.7x more … Analog I/Os don’t scale as well as digital logic, so its fine to keep them on 14 nm … Others will take a similar approach,” said Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief technologist.

Analysts such as Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy agreed.

“I believe this is the future of the entire chip industry as manufacturing large, monolithic dies is getting harder and more expensive,” said Moorhead. “The next steps in the industry will be to adopt 2.5D and 3D packages where these chiplets are stacked on top of each other.”

The 7-nm Epyc, aka Rome, is the first x86 server processor to use PCIe Gen 4. It sports up to 128 lanes of the interconnect compared to 96 lanes of Gen 3 for Intel’s current high-end server chips.

Rome packs up to 64 dual-threaded Zen 2 cores, twice as many as the 14-nm Naples chip that used first-generation Zen cores. The chips and a next-generation Milan will all fit into the same socket, so companies do not have to design new motherboards.

Overall, Rome delivers twice the throughput of Naples and four times its floating-point performance, said AMD. However, it declined to give target data rates, specific benchmarks or other details about the chip said to still be in a working prototype slated to ship sometime in 2019.