I’ve spent the majority of my career focused on making systems that weave the fabric of data into our lives. It’s critical that we do not simply create technology for technology’s sake, but that we create solutions to make a difference.

This is why I joined AMD almost three years ago. To be part of a team with the creativity and willingness to innovate and differentiate for our customers. To be a part of a team that would harness AMD’s heritage of innovation and disruption, anticipating customer demands to create more than a choice, but a better choice in high-performance CPUs.

AMD has a great history focused on bringing innovative products to market, and this month marks a strong continuation of that heritage. This is a huge moment for our entire industry as we launch a new family of high-performance server and datacenter processors, the AMD EPYC™ 7000-series, which will deliver greater performance than current solutions at every competitive price point.

The inventive design of EPYC achieves record-setting performance, with to up to 32 high-performance cores supported by a rich set of capabilities. All EPYC processors include:

Industry-leading memory bandwidth including 8-channels of DDR 4 memory

Unprecedented support for integrated, high-speed I/O with 128 lanes of PCIe® 3

Dedicated security subsystem that takes data encryption to the next level

EPYC represents a new, comprehensive approach to processors and system design that has been tailored to solve the unique challenges of the datacenter and today’s workloads. We’re incredibly proud of EPYC’s power and performance, and this platform will help companies optimize and right size in new ways. Single socket options with 32, 24 and 16 cores ensure customers new choice to maximize utilization and efficiency. They drive up to 20 percent lower cap-ex letting companies big and small to do more with less.

One of the principal goals for EPYC was to create a processor for the cloud era, tuned not only for the performance demands of modern scale-out software, but also able to meet the challenge of cloud security. EPYC includes a Hardware Validated Boot capability that helps assure the user that the firmware in the system is free of malware.

AMD added unique encryption technology to further enhance security. The Secure Memory Encryption (SME) feature allows an admin to encrypt all memory transactions leaving the processor. This enables a whole new level of protection against physical attacks and uniquely protecting even non-volatile memory DIMMS that would otherwise be vulnerable to being removed from the system and compromised. A step beyond SME is Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) which enables VMs or containers to encrypt themselves and their memory with unique keys, protecting VMs from each other or even from a rogue systems administrator. SEV is truly security for the cloud era as it allows users to be more secure even in a multi-tenant cloud environment. Both SME and SEV are enabled via a cryptographic engine in the on-chip memory controller. This performs the encryption tasks with minimal impacts to application performance.

We know that product innovation is not enough. Any server must be supported with a global ecosystem of partners and customers and we are proud to be engaged with industry leaders including HPE, Dell, Supermicro, Lenovo, Microsoft Azure, Baidu, Dropbox, Sugon, Tyan, Asus, Gigabyte, Inventec, and Wistron. In addition, primary hypervisor and server operating system providers Microsoft, VMware, and Red Hat, are showcasing optimized support for EPYC, while key server hardware ecosystem partners like Samsung, Mellanox, and Xilinx are also featured in EPYC-optimized platforms.

EPYC is the processor that can tackle the toughest demands of the datacenter, whether you are talking about high-performance computing, the cloud, machine learning or big data and analytics. Today marks the start of a new era, not just for AMD, but for our customers, partners and the entire industry.

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.