Computex 2021: AMD Announcement Recap
June 3, 2021Computex 2021, a month-long virtual event, hit the ground running on June 1st with big announcements from AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel. Each company shared what’s next for the wonderful world of technology, giving us the latest and greatest products to make our lives easier. What’s even better is that some of these will be available in a matter of weeks!
3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs
Because of the pandemic, AMD’s CEO Dr. Lisa Su welcomed a small group of fully vaccinated AMD employees who worked on the products. Everyone wore a mask and were socially distanced. Su began her keynote with the latest 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, featuring the new Zen 3 core, which is expected to be installed in more than 100 EPYC-based server platforms in 2021. “We currently hold 220 world records across nearly every type of application and workload and customer, and that spans cloud, enterprise, and HPC,” added Su. “EPYC holds world records in integer, floating point, Java, virtualization, database, and analytics.”
She compared the latest AMD EPYC CPU to the latest Intel Xeon CPU, codenamed Ice Lake. The two were put to the test with a demo that reflects a typical online retail environment. “E-commerce is now part of our daily lives. Retail businesses of all sizes are challenged to meet growing compute demands while managing infrastructure costs,” she explained.
As transaction requests started coming in, both processors launched at full speed, but as more and more requests started coming in, Intel’s CPU wasn’t able to keep up the pace. The Intel Xeon 8380 “Ice Lake” processor maxed out at around 200,000 Java operations per second, while AMD EPYC’s 7763 processor kept going, delivering leadership throughput all the way to about 300,000 Java operations per second.
At 64 cores, compared to Intel’s 40 cores, the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processor takes huge strides in the data center delivering 50% more business transactions. “We’re really proud of the 3rd Gen EPYC,” said Su. “It is the world’s fastest server processor powering infrastructure and services from the largest cloud providers, delivering the best total cost of ownership for the enterprise, with ready to deploy solutions.”
AMD Ryzen 5000G Series
Su transitioned to industry-leading IT and how it’s being used for content creation applications and gaming. She announced that a new desktop processor, the AMD Ryzen 5000G series, would include the latest Zen 3 architecture and top-of-the-line graphics. Running without a graphics card, the gaming demo that Su showed averaged 78 frames per second at 1080p. The two new Ryzen 5000 APUs, the Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G, will be available August 5.
AMD RDNA 2
AMD also showed off the RDNA 2 architecture, reminding us that it’s part of the impossible-to-find Playstation 5 and Xbox systems. The new technology will not only be in the popular new game consoles, but also on the road in the electric vehicle market! The new Tesla Model S and X will have this new technology. The next place we’ll find the RDNA 2 will be the high-performance mobile phone market. Because AMD has a partnership with Samsung, they will integrate custom graphics to Samsung’s next flagship mobile system-on-chip with ray tracing and variable rate shading capabilities.
AMD FidelityFX
Next up was AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) unveiling, AMD’s comeback to NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). FSR makes a game look like it’s rendering at a higher resolution, so it can be running at 1080p, but make it look like 1440p! It works across many generations of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, but they’re sticking to the newer ones at launch on June 22.
7nm to 5nm
As early adopters of industry-leading technology, AMD has delivered more than 30 products in 7nm across all of their markets. They also have a roadmap to 5nm technology, which is on track with the new Zen 4 products that will be available next year! There’s so much to look forward to! To watch the entire AMD keynote, click here.
