Chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on Wednesday launched the second generation EPYC, a Central Processing Unit (CPU), which the company termed as the world’s “highest” performance x86 processor. The CPU’s – named Rome – performance is nearly double than that offered by its competitor Intel Corp.

“Security is the foundation we must offer our customers or our users and this has to be designed in from the ground up,” Lisa Su, president and Chief Executive Officer at AMD said in her keynote address, adding, the chip comes with increased performance and efficiency that will slash costs to data centre owners by half.

The EPYC 7002 series chip comes with 64 processing cores, 128 threads and manufactured under 7-nanometre technology.

While Google was the first to deploy ‘Rome’ in its production data centre, Twitter is using the chipset to improve total cost of ownership (TCO) of its data centres by 25 per cent, while HP Enterprises and Lenovo announced immediate availability on new platforms.

Additionally, the second generation EPYC processors are also being adopted by Microsoft Azure for general purpose applications, cloud-based remote desktops and high performance computing among others. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is using it for servers, Cray to provide weather information to the US Air Force and Army, Lenovo for video infrastructure, virtualisation and software-defined storage among others. Dell, VMware and Twitter are among others using the chipset.

“Using the AMD EPYC 7702 processor we can scale out our compute clusters with more cores in less space using less power, which translates to a 25 per cent lower TCO for Twitter,” Jennifer Fraser, senior director of Engineering at Twitter said.

The company had launched the first generation EPYC – Naples – in 2017.

The reporter is in San Francisco at the invitation of AMD

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