Microsoft, HPE, Oracle, VMware announce new HPC offerings on AMD's new EPYC chips

Following today’s launch of AMD’s fourth generation EPYC processors, three of the chipmaker’s major vendor partners Microsoft, HPE, VMware and Oracle have unveiled their own offerings using the new chips.

The chips, codenamed “Genoa”, are scalable up to 96 cores and is based on the 5 nanometre Zen 4 core architecture.

In the keynote address by AMD chief executive Lisa Su, Microsoft announced new high performance computing (HPC) offerings in the new HX series and HBv4 series virtual machines.

Microsoft executive vice president of cloud and AI group Scott Guthrie talked up AMD and Microsoft's shared commitment to helping customers speed up digital transformation, specifically in high performance computing.

“We recognise the cloud plays a key role in helping our customers do more with less and overcome the dynamic challenges they face,” Guthrie said.

“The VMs are purpose built to help silicon design customers save money on EDA operations to deliver products to market faster.”

Both the HX and fourth gen HB series feature 400 gigabit InfiniBand and Microsoft’s next generation networking technology to bring supercomputing scale to all its Azure customers. Guthrie said the Genoa-based technologies will go into general availability in the first half of 2023.

Oracle also announced new general purpose and general base compute offerings based on the chips, as well as a new HPC optimised system based on the tech.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure executive vice president Clay Magouyrk said the HPC optimised system also offers new RDMA networking capability and bare metal offering, claiming EPYC helps provide the highest peak performance available.

“We're always very focused on how we have the highest performance systems. So with things like our exit data that we run like our autonomous database on the most recent version of our actual data systems also run on EPYC processors because it offers you the best and highest performance database system out there,” he said.

HPE meanwhile announced six new Genoa-based offerings on its HPE ProLiant server range, HPE GreenLake cloud services platform, and its Cray EX and Cray XD supercomputing range.

“We are committed to delivering greater choices and simplicity through the HP Green Lake Cloud Platform, which supports most of the HBase innovation using the fourth generation AMD EPYC processor,” HPE chief executive Antonio Neri said.

“Customers can easily adopt cloud services with advanced performance while gaining critical capabilities and governance and security and visibility on new products, including the new HP ProLiant servers that offer enterprise customers a secure and simplified cloud management experience with the workload optimised performance to target a range of applications across edge AI, analytics and cloud native.”

Neri added the new Cray EX and XD offerings based on fourth-gen EPYC would also deliver some of the same technologies found in the Frontier Supercomputer but in a smaller footprint targeted to customers looking to advance product design and accelerate innovation for organisations of all sizes.

VMware also announced a new version of the recently announced vSphere workload platform optimised for the Genoa chips.

“VMware is proud to announce that vSphere 8 is available and optimised for the fourth gen AMD EPYC processors.” VMware chief executive Raghu Raghuram said.

“This combination of vSphere and EPYC allows enterprises to realise hyper optimised performance with the lowest TCO and energy consumption, all in pursuit of datacenter modernisation for our customers.”

Raghuram added EPYC’s confidential computing feature would also help boost VMware’s security solutions when running EPYC processors, including on-premises data centres.

“Whether you use virtual machines or containers, the combination of AMD epic processors and VMware vSphere provides a proven path for data centre modernisation across industries.”

Lisa Su called Genoa the highest performance and most efficient server CPU in the world.

“We’re extremely proud of that, and when you look in the cloud, EPYC has actually become the industry standard based on our performance, compute density and total cost of ownership,” she said.

“Every major cloud provider has deployed EPYC in their internal workloads, plus the external customer facing workloads, resulting in nearly 600 public EPYC instances available across everywhere.”

Su also touted the use of the chips in scientific research, claiming five of the top ten most powerful supercomputers and eight of the top ten most efficient supercomputers are using EPYC chips, including Frontier, which Su called the world’s first exascale supercomputer that is both the fastest and most efficient in the world.

Nico Arboleda travelled to San Francisco for the AMD EPYC launch as a guest of AMD.