AMD today revealed a new series of processors that will power servers, virtual machines (VM), and data centers from many of the industry’s top vendors and hyperscale cloud providers. The second-generation AMD EPYC 7002 Series processors feature 7 nanometer (nm) technology that delivers double the performance of AMD’s previous chip generation and reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) up to 50%, according to the vendor.

The introduction of the new chips brought together a who’s who of data center providers, server vendors, and cloud providers. AMD says more than 60 partners are already on board. Google, Microsoft, Dell EMC, Broadcom, Cray, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo, Mellanox, Red Hat, Twitter, VMware, and others boasted support for the chips with new products and services — some of which are available today.

Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, attended AMD’s launch event and left with high impressions, calling it a “big step forward” for AMD in the data center and a “bigger leap forward” than he expected from the company overall.

“AMD gained low, single-digit share with first generation EPYC but I expect the company to gain more share with second generation EPYC with [communications service providers], enterprises, and [high-performance computing],” he wrote in an email. 

AMD claims its second generation EPYC processors provide up to 83% better Java application performance and “world record performance” in virtualization and real time analytics with Hadoop. The chips feature up to 64 “Zen 2” cores per system on a chip that deliver up to 23% more instructions per clock per core on server workloads, according to AMD. The vendor also claims its new chips offer the most dynamic random-access memory and bandwidth in its class, including up to double the performance in computational fluid dynamics and up to 72% higher performance in structural analysis.

“The AMD EPYC 7002 Series value proposition is simple: more cores open the door for more virtual machines, better consolidation, lower costs, and simpler management,” Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president and CTO at AMD, wrote in a blog post.

The processors are “performing exceptionally well” and have advantages in many workloads, but not all workloads, Moorhead explains. “Intel will likely have advantages on low latency machine learning inference workloads,” and while AMD is focused on optimizing workloads it doesn’t provide as many elements to original design and equipment manufacturers as Intel, he added

Google is using AMD’s new EPYC processors for internal workloads and says the chips will support the “largest general purpose VMs” it's ever offered on the Google Cloud Compute Engine later this year. Microsoft is previewing new Azure VMs for general purpose applications, remote desktops anchored in the cloud and high-performance computing workloads.

HPE and Lenovo announced immediate availability of new servers based on the AMD EPYC 7002 Series with the former claiming it broke 37 world records on performance and efficiency and the latter boasting a reduced TCO by up to 46% and up to a 73% reduction in software licensing costs. Dell EMC revealed three new servers based on AMD’s new processor for software-defined environments, edge and high-performance computing. And Cray, which is being acquired by HPE, also announced it will be using the chips to provide terrestrial and space weather information to the U.S. Air Force and Army.

“Enterprises want the confidence that AMD has a high probability and compelling three- to five-year roadmap. Enterprises aren’t interested in point solutions and they want long-term partners. AMD has already proven itself to public cloud providers and needs to shift that momentum to enterprises,” Moorhead concluded. “AMD is investing a lot more in the enterprise value chain over the last two years but nowhere to the degree that Intel has been investing the last decade.”