Today I am excited to let you know that the AMD EPYC Cloud footprint is increasing globally with Tencent Cloud announcing its 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor-based “Star Lake” Server Platform at the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Conference.

Let’s take a closer look at the latest Tencent Cloud announcement and how the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor-powered “Star Lake” platform enables Tencent Cloud to achieve their business goals and extend performance & TCO advantages to their customers.

Enhanced efficiency and scalable performance for exponentially growing cloud service

Tencent recently became the first Chinese company with more than 1.1 million servers in their network and is one of the fastest growing cloud computing companies in the global IaaS market. This rapid business growth brings new challenges including efficiency improvement and operational cost reduction for the infrastructure. To address these challenges Tencent Cloud developed a technology system from the infrastructure layer to the application layer to enable the next stage of cloud computing growth.

Server design, energy efficiency, security features, and reliability have a direct impact on the performance and cost efficiency of Cloud Service Provider offerings. The 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor based “Star Lake” server platform is Tencent’s first self-designed server developed for the Tencent Cloud environment. Tencent employed many advanced capabilities to improve energy efficiency. For example, according to Tencent, the advanced thermosyphon heat dissipation technology used in “Star Lake” improves maximum load energy efficiency by 50%. The “Star Lake” platform is designed to optimize cloud computing, storage and network requirements to effectively meet 98% of Tencent cloud application scenarios.

Liu YuXun, General Manager of Tencent's server supply chain Announcing the AMD EPYC Powered Star Lake Server Platform at the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Conference, 2019.

Industry's best single core performance and significant single core TCO savings with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC Processor Powered “Star Lake” server

According to test results presented by Tencent Cloud at the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Conference, the “Star Lake” Server with Tencent’s SA 2 instance powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors achieved the industry’s best single core performance and provides a significant TCO advantage. Tencent Cloud’s results in the image above show that the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor-based “Star Lake” server platform improves the overall performance of Tencent’s SA 2 cloud service instances by 35%, including 40% improvement in video processing, 35% improvement in graphics transcoding and 150% improvement in page QPS. This enables Tencent Cloud to provide performance enhancements and cost efficiencies to end customers.

You can read more about this at the Tencent Cloud Star Lake Announcement here. It's in Mandarin but can be translated easily!

I greatly appreciate the close collaboration and efforts of the Tencent Cloud and AMD teams to bring these innovations to our customers.