The AMD Rome launching event turned out to be a very well orchestrated live presentation, at the Palace of Fine Art Theater in San Francisco. It was well attended by all relevant media, and all the important partners were there in force.
The presentation can be seen here.
Anandtech did a very nice live blog, here.
In short, Rome beats Xeon in performance, performance per watt, and TCO.
Initial reactions were spectacular.
Anandtech says:“So has AMD done the unthinkable? Beaten Intel by such a large margin that there is no contest? For now, based on our preliminary testing, that is the case. The launch of AMD’s second generation EPYC processors is nothing short of historic, beating the competition by a large margin in almost every metric: performance, performance per watt and performance per dollar.
Servethehome says “AMD Epyc Rome delivers a knockout!” and “The bottom line is this: for the vast majority of the market, the TCO story for the AMD EPYC 7702P, and other SKUs is too good to ignore. Intel does not have a competitive product on tap until 2020.”
Patrick Moorhead also said in Forbes that AMD delivered big at this launch.
Here is a list of partners who appeared on stage.
HPE, line of servers, ready today, eventually tripling their offerings. Many world records already broken with Rome, in great range of workloads.
Twitter, using Rome for their datacenters, with 25% lower TCO. This is very good endorsement.
Dell/EMC. New servers. Dell has always been an Intel shop. It remains to be seen how much they end up promoting Rome.
VMWare, collaborating with AMD on new security and other high performance features with Rome.
Cray, with many HPC wins using Epyc/Rome. Also Frontier exascale supercomputer. AMD is getting excellent adoption in the HPC space, which is great for mind share! The latest win is from the Air Force Weather, previously unannounced.
Lenovo, with full range of new systems.
Microsoft Azure, with three Epyc announcements, including Azure virtual machines, cloud-based remote desktops and HPC workloads.
Finally, Google! Google is already using Rome for their own use (potentially massive), and will use Rome for their customers via Google Cloud as well. I am sure by now it’s obvious that Google will use Rome for Stadia, wherever feasible. This is a great win, and confirms the previous rumor regarding server boards being made to use Epyc instead of Xeon.
I am looking forward to more reviews appearing over the next few days, and some analyst upgrades.
Rome is looking really good. AMD also had emphasized that Milan is on track and even Epyc 4 is already being designed. A solid road map is very important for future customers. AMD had also mentioned that they promise to be a reliable supplier, unlike the last time they left the server space, leaving bad taste all around.
One final note. There were two fake news put out before the Rome launch. One was from Wccftech.com, on Lisa Su leaving AMD for IBM. Lisa Su immediately denied this rumor on Twitter, yet this reporter “stands by his story”. The other was from Fudzilla, something about Rome using high voltage, higher than TSMC recommended. This claim was immediately shot down by all knowledgeable techies. Fortunately neither fake news gained any traction. Could Intel be behind these?
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