AMD 5th Gen EPYC Turin CPUs Launched: Up To 37% IPC Increase, Up To 192 Cores, 500W TDP, 5 GHz Clocks & Significantly Outperforming Xeon

AMD’s 5th Gen EPYC CPUs, codenamed Turin, are now official, and bring major uplifts across the board with the Zen 5 core architecture.

AMD Zen 5 Now Launched For Data Centers With 5th Gen EPYC “Turin” Family: Up To 192 Cores, 500W TDPs and 5 GHz Clock Speeds

The day is finally here, it’s the start of a new chapter of EPYC with a brand new core architecture that once again delivers substantial generational uplifts and further elevates AMD’s hold of the data center segments.

Since launch, AMD’s EPYC CPUs have amassed a 34% market share hold in the server segment, up from 2% back in 2018. The AMD EPYC platform is being used by some of the world’s biggest tech companies with over 950 cloud instances and over 350 OEM platforms & now it’s time for an upgrade!

AMD 5th Gen EPYC “Turin” CPUs: IPC, Configs & SP5 Platform Upgrades

Meet Turin, the 5th Gen EPYC CPU family which is being branded under the “EPYC 9005” series. The lineup is set out to achieve three goals, extend server CPU leadership, propel towards efficient modernization, and offer an End-to-End AI leadership platform. To achieve these goals, AMD is using its latest Zen 5 core architecture to power the family. We have detailed the Zen 5 architecture in detail here.

For its 5th Gen EPYC lineup, there are going to be two solutions. The 4nm version of Turin with up to 16 “Zen 5” CCDs, offering up to 128 cores and 256 threads, which is referred to as the “Scale-Up” variant while the second one is the “Scale-Out” variant which utilizes the 3nm “Zen 5C” cores with up to 12 CCDs, offering up to 192 cores and 384 threads.

Turin packs up to 17 chiplets with a total of 150 Billion transistors for the full chip. The CPUs will come with AVX-512 support with a full 512b data path & up to 5 GHz clock speeds. Chips can be configured in 1P or 2P servers.

In terms of IPC improvement, AMD states that Zen 5 delivers “exceptional uplifts” over the previous generation with up to a 17% increase for Enterprise and Cloud platforms and up to a 37% increase for HPC and AI platforms.

• EPYC Zen 5C: Up To 192 Cores, 384 MB L3 Cache (+50% More Cores / L3 Cache Versus Zen 4C)
• EPYC Zen 5: Up To 128 Cores, 512 MB L3 Cache (+33% More Cores / L3 Cache Versus Zen 4)

The lineup scales from 8 cores to up to 192 cores and TDPs scale from 155W to up to 500W. As for the platform itself, AMD is relying on the same SP5 socket for both variants of Turin which makes it an easy drop-in upgrade from the previous Genoa and Bergamo “Zen 4” releases.

The platform still offers a 12-channel memory solution but now has DDR5 speeds configured up to 6400 MT/s with ECC support, 6 TB capacities per socket & you still get 128 PCie 5.0/CXL 2.0 lanes. New on Turin is support for PPR or Dynamic Post Package Repair for x4 and x8 ECC RDIMMs. On the security front, you get Trusted I/O, FIPS 140-3 in process, and Hardware Root-of-Trust support.

AMD EPYC 9005 SKU Lineup: Up To 192 “Zen 5C” & 128 “Zen 5” Cores

The 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin” lineup will consist of a total of 27 SKUs which include the EPYC 9965 as the 192-core “Zen 5C” flagship, the EPYC 9755 as the 128-core “Zen 5” flagship, and the EPYC 9575F “Zen 5” chip as the first 5 GHz EPYC SKU.

Moving to the details of the flagship SKUs, the AMD EPYC 9965 will feature 192 cores, 384 threads, and 384 MB of L3 cache. This chip will feature a 2.25 GHz base clock and a 3.7 GHz boost clock. The CPU will be configured at a default TDP of 500W and will be priced at $14,813 which is significantly lower than Intel’s top Xeon 6900P offering which is priced at $17,800 US. That’s a 17% higher price for Intel’s flagship offering with 128 cores.

The EPYC 9755 which is based on the standard Zen 5 cores will come configured with 128 cores, 256 threads, 512 MB of L3 cache, a base clock of 2.7 GHz, a boost clock of 4.1 GHz, and a TDP of 500W. This chip will feature a price of $12,984 US which is again much lower than Intel’s 6980P chip, marking a -27% difference.

AMD also has several frequency-optimized variants in 64, 48, 32, 24, and 16 core flavors. The top part is the EPYC 9575F which offers 64 cores, 128 threads, 256 MB of L3 cache, a 400W TDP, a base clock of 3.3 GHz, and a boost clock of 5.0 GHz. This chip is priced at $11,791 US. Lastly, we should mention the entry-level 8-core SKU, the EPYC 9015, which is configured with a 125W TDP and has a base clock of 3.6 GHz, and a boost clock of 4.1 GHz and 64 MB of L3 cache. This chip will cost $527 US.

The full lineup and their respective specs/prices can be seen in the table below:

AMD 5th Gen EPYC Turin CPU Lineup Specs:

AMD EPYC Outpacing Intel Xeon Across The Board

Now let’s talk about performance, throughout its slides, AMD compares its 5th Gen EPYC CPUs against the 4th Gen EPYC and 5th Gen Intel Xeon lineup. The red team starts by presenting a world record within the SPEC CPU 2017 Integer Throughput tests, leading Intel by 2.7x and 4th Gen EPYC by almost 60%.

In terms of per-core performance measured using 32-core parts in the SPECrate 2017 INT base test, the 5th Gen EPYC CPUs deliver a 40% improvement over Intel’s 5th Gen Emerald rapids and a 27% uplift over the 4th Gen EPYC SKU. AMD even highlights strong performance at the same cost of licensing in the virtualized segment.

In terms of workload performance, the AMD EPYC 9965 192 core CPU offers up to a 4x increase in video transcoding (FFMPEG raw to vp9), 2.3x increase in Business app performance (Specjbb), 3.9x increase in open-source databases (MySQL OLTP), and a 3x increase in Image Rendering (vRay 5) performance versus the Intel 5th Gen Xeon SKU. The EPYC 9965 does offer 3x more cores than the Intel Xeon 8592+ chip which offers 64 cores.

So how about performance using the same core count, well AMD also showcased 64-core EPYC 9575F comparisons against the EPYC 9554 and Xeon 8592+. The Zen 5 part with the same core count still leads in performance by up to 1.6x across a range of Enterprise HPC workloads such as Ansys LS-DYNA, Altair Radioss, Ansys Fluent, and Altair AcuSolve.

The Opensource HPC performance sees a big gain too across Dense Linear Solver and Modeling & Simulation workloads with the EPYC 9965x delivering anywhere from 2.1 to 3.9x gains over the Intel Xeon CPU and over 2x gains against the 4th gen EPYC “Genoa” CPUs.

For AI performance, AMD is also touting some big gains, mostly coming from those AVX-512 512b capabilities which do yield up to an impressive 3.8x gain in performance. Faster SKUs such as the 5 GHz EPYC 9575F deliver a 28% speedup in GPU orchestration tasks.

Turin Extends AMD’s TCO Leadership, New NVIDIA HGX/MGX & Instinct Solutions

AMD’s EPYC platform is known for delivering superb performance at great value and that continues with Turin. With Turin, AMD says that data center firms can move from 1000 servers based on older CPU platforms to just 131 modern servers equipped with EPYC 9965 CPUs. This 7-to-1 approach will allow data center firms to easily migrate to the latest chips while retaining the same x86 architecture set, the same mature ecosystem & same robust tools available at their disposal.

The AMD EPYC Turin platform can provide up to 68% reduction in power requirements, up to 87% reduction in server space, and lead to 67% lower TCO over 3 years. AMD also proposes that the extra save spacings can be used to grow the AI and compute capabilities of data centers by over 1.1 Million AI TOPs using just 416 GPUs and a 2.5x compute performance increment coming from those new 640 CPU racks.

AMD is also outlying its EPYC platform to be used as an AI Host CPU for AMD Instinct and NVIDIA MGX/HGX platforms. The solution can be equipped with up to 8 OAM MI300X or MI325X GPUs & configurations that use the EPYC 9575F 5 GHz chip and can see up to a 20% performance increase in AI inferencing and up to 15% uplift in training.

For NVIDIA, the MGX solutions can be equipped with up to 16 AI accelerators (Hopper/Blackwell) and HGX configurations can get up to 8 accelerators with up to 2 EPYC CPUs. AMD & NVIDIA have announced a technical partnership, recommending a range of EPYC CPUs ranging from 32, 48, and 64 cores which can be seen below:

Overall, AMD’s 5th Gen EPYC “Turin” family looks to be another disruptive launch, especially given the performance and value they have on offer. AMD isn’t sharing the performance figures against Intel’s Xeon 6900P for now but we can expect a few updates in the coming months as both chips become widely available.