AMD have just launched their first Zen core based processors with Ryzen 7 for Desktop computing, but only a few days after gone by and more news is now being shared about Naples; AMD’s attack on Intel’s dominance in Datacenters.
AMD have argued that Intel have been sloppy with new hardware, and aren’t providing big enough performance upgrades, with everything new just bringing incremental upgrades. Truth be told, we doubt anyone would disagree, but no competition, means no real point.
AMD will be launching Naples will a mass array of performance gains and features that they promise will be extremely competitive against Intel and their current best offer: the Broadwell-EP-based Xeon E5 V4.
Naples main attraction will be the 32-cores with hyper-threading, 8 memory channels with up to 2TB support, and 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes. Comparatively, Intel only offer 22-cores/44-threads, 4 memory channels, and 1.5TB max memory.
Naples is marketed a 2-socket chip and when adding a second chip to a system, it will utilise 64 of the PCIe lanes for direct socket-to-socket communication, or as AMD are calling it, their Infinity Frabric.
Naples arrives Q2 2017, and so far AMD have only given us a glimpse into the kind of processing power we can expect. Limiting the cores to 44 and RAM to 1,866Mhz shows that AMD’s hardware has 2x performance over Intel with an 18 sec mark over Intel’s 35 seconds. With Naples running without limits, it brings the 18 seconds down to 14 seconds.
When quadruples the worload, AMD showed that their system when running with 44-cores and 2,400MHz memory, it would complete in 54-seconds, with the Intel machine unable to handle the memory set.
It’s still a few months away before Naples arrives, but so far everything looks extremely impressive, and better competition in datacenters, can lead to better products, services and most of all cheaper across the board.
