AMD Next Horizon Live Blog: Starts 9am PT / 5pm UTC

11:54AM EST - AMD's 2019 is set to be full of 7nm products, and on the back of AMD's New Horizon event on 2016, today it is hosting part two: Next Horizon. In CEO Dr. Lisa Su's welcome letter, it states that AMD is set to 'enter a new chapter in [its] journey to deliver the datacenter of the future'. I'm here in San Francisco to get all the details on what appears to be discussions and presentations about the next generation EPYC and 7nm Vega, as well as customer responses and deployments about AMD's current datacenter portfolio.

11:55AM EST - I'm now sat down ready to begin

11:59AM EST - I'm sat next to Paul from Tom's and Charlie from SemiAccurate

12:00PM EST - Our schedule mentions Radeon Instinct, EPYC, and ROCm

12:00PM EST - This is truly going to be a datacenter event

12:01PM EST - Opening video

12:01PM EST - Just quoted AnandTech in the video

 

12:02PM EST - Dr Lisa Su to the stage

12:02PM EST - 'Excited to talk about the next horizon of computing'

12:02PM EST - Two years first discussed Zen

12:02PM EST - A lot has happened since

12:03PM EST - It's all about the journey

12:03PM EST - Four key tenets

12:03PM EST - 1/ High Perf, 2/ Great Products, 3/ Ambitious Goals, 4/ Undaunted Determination

12:03PM EST - Be incredibly ambitious

12:04PM EST - Focusing on great tech and IP: High perf Graphics and high perf compute

12:04PM EST - Coming with solutions and unique differentiations

12:04PM EST - adding value to the ecosystem

12:04PM EST - There's a lot still to do

12:04PM EST - We love all of our markets - consumer and gaming too

12:04PM EST - lots of innovation

12:04PM EST - but the focus today is in datacenter

12:05PM EST - Lisa got into to Semiconductors because she liked to solve problems

12:05PM EST - Need high perf CPU and GPU to solve modern problems

12:05PM EST - The datacenter is evolving

12:06PM EST - more and more devices being connected requires infrastructure

12:06PM EST - Workloads that are driving computing are growing exponentially

12:06PM EST - An incredible need for more computing horsepower

12:06PM EST - Workloads are very different to those from 10 years ago

12:06PM EST - AMD is very excited

12:06PM EST - The DC represents an incredible opportunity

12:07PM EST - $29b market in 2021 for AMD Total Addressable Market

12:07PM EST - The GPU/Accelerator environment is growing a lot

12:07PM EST - A strong double digit growth over the foreseeable future

12:07PM EST - AMD's approach is different to the competition

12:08PM EST - Not looking at incremental changes

12:08PM EST - Some workloads require specialisation

12:08PM EST - Aggressive roadmaps. Made some important bets

12:09PM EST - Products today are results of bets and decisions made 4-5 years ago

12:09PM EST - Influence for the future

12:09PM EST - How we connect in the system and bring customers more performance and more capabilities

12:09PM EST - This is how AMD approaches the DC

12:09PM EST - 15 months since EPYC launch

12:09PM EST - First Zen processor

12:09PM EST - reintroduction to the DC

12:10PM EST - Really pleased about how customers have adopted EPYC

12:10PM EST - Can get more performance at every price point

12:10PM EST - More flexibility at every price point

12:10PM EST - Choose the right config for every situation

12:10PM EST - Bringing down TCO

12:10PM EST - How everything comes together

12:10PM EST - Also Radeon Instinct

12:11PM EST - MI25 with 25TF perf

12:11PM EST - Ideal for ML and Cloud Gaming

12:11PM EST - Also ROCm

12:11PM EST - ecosystem beyond the hardware

12:11PM EST - software ecosystem is critical

12:11PM EST - Making sure we have the guts of it all

12:12PM EST - AMD momentum on EPYC and Instinct

12:12PM EST - Great first 15 months

12:12PM EST - Every major OEM and ODM with EPYC platforms

12:12PM EST - SIs and Partners supporting CPU / GPU platforms

12:12PM EST - Also cloud deployments

12:13PM EST - Azure, Baidu, Tencent, Oracle, Dropbox

12:13PM EST - Cloud instances made available to a large number of users

12:13PM EST - GPU with Alibaba, Baidu, AWS

12:13PM EST - Momentum is clearly here

12:13PM EST - Today announcements

12:13PM EST - Technology and demos

12:14PM EST - Major new announcement

12:14PM EST - Goal with EPYC is to reach the most number of users possible

12:14PM EST - Must be partnered with cloud #1

12:14PM EST - AMD and AWS

12:15PM EST - Incredible ride with AWS

12:15PM EST - (If you're reading this on Youtube via a 'livestream', please head to AnandTech.com to get the proper story)

12:15PM EST - AWS has a long term view

12:15PM EST - Listening to AWS customers

12:16PM EST - Security, reliability and performance is important

12:16PM EST - AWS customers want choice

12:16PM EST - AWS wants to support every single workload out there

12:16PM EST - Also cost

12:16PM EST - Every customer is interested in cost

12:16PM EST - AMD is helping deliver lower pricing

12:17PM EST - R5A, T3A, and one other coming in a few weeks

12:17PM EST - Most popular instance types

12:17PM EST - Some instances available today

12:17PM EST - R5a, M5a today, T3a soon

12:17PM EST - Use the same scripts and APIs as you do today

12:18PM EST - Can instantly save 10% on compute costs

12:18PM EST - No change in software to current customers

12:18PM EST - Many customers are running large databases on M5 can use M5a

12:18PM EST - Hadoop

12:18PM EST - Exceptional Perf per dollar

12:19PM EST - Now for the next horizon

12:20PM EST - New Zen 2 High Perf core

12:20PM EST - 7nm

12:20PM EST - Modular system design

12:20PM EST - The early pieces of Zen 2 today

12:20PM EST - Not only CPU but also system design

12:20PM EST - All very innovative

12:20PM EST - Betting big on 7nm

12:20PM EST - Papermaster to do that presentation

12:21PM EST - Also David Wang will present about designing GPUs for the cloud

12:21PM EST - High-Perf compute engines

12:21PM EST - Additional specs will be coming for MI60

12:21PM EST - First 7nm GPU in the industry

12:21PM EST - For cloud applications

12:21PM EST - Also hearing from Forrest Norrod about Rome

12:22PM EST - First preview of Rome

12:22PM EST - Vision where Rome fits in the industry

12:22PM EST - Incredible capabilities

12:22PM EST - AMD's Total Commitment to the Datacenter

12:22PM EST - AMD loves to solve hard problems

12:22PM EST - It is about what we can do for our customers

12:23PM EST - Mark Papermaster to the stage

12:24PM EST - The CPU journey

12:24PM EST - Zen is a new phase of high perf

12:24PM EST - Scalability of FinFET in 14nm and 12nm

12:24PM EST - Focused a lot of energy into Infinity Fabric

12:24PM EST - Important for scalability

12:25PM EST - Zen had +52% IPC improvement

12:25PM EST - It showed that with focus, AMD can deliver

12:25PM EST - AMD committed to a strong roadmap

12:25PM EST - leapfrogging roadmap with zero product gap

12:25PM EST - That's why today is so important

12:26PM EST - Zen 2 is now sampling, Zen 3 is on track

12:26PM EST - Zen 2 to market in 2019

12:26PM EST - Always two full design efforts in flight

12:27PM EST - AMD is stable and has been executing to the called play

12:27PM EST - Bringing leadership to the most demanding emerging workloads

12:27PM EST - Focusing on execution and delivery

12:27PM EST - The roadmap is as important as the product for enterprise customers

12:27PM EST - It's a gamechanger for AMD

12:28PM EST - Looking back on AMD's high performance in the market with Zen

12:28PM EST - Ryzen, Threadripper, EPYC, Ryzen Mobile

12:28PM EST - Driving changes with Ryzen

12:28PM EST - Leveraging investments in hidden gems

12:29PM EST - Infinity Fabric and modularity

12:29PM EST - Ryzen has been awarded 700 recognitions since launch

12:29PM EST - This is a phenomenal time for transition to AMD

12:30PM EST - AMD is committed to generational improvement

12:30PM EST - Starting with 7nm

12:30PM EST - Picking the right technology is phenominally important

12:30PM EST - AMD made a huge bet on 7nm

12:31PM EST - For AMD's customers, 10nm wasn't the right note. 7nm is set to be a long sustained node in the industry

12:32PM EST - The benefit of the lower power and die area is worth it. Deep partnership with TSMC.

12:33PM EST - 7nm offers 2x density, 0.5x power (at same perf), 1.25x perf (at same power)

12:34PM EST - 7nm delivers tremendous value

12:35PM EST - 7nm is now leadership - the competition can't compete

12:39PM EST - First to market with 7nm in the DC

12:46PM EST - Our CMS is having issues

12:47PM EST - Industry most leading edge technology

12:49PM EST - TSMC has been working closely with AMD

12:52PM EST - Zen 2

12:52PM EST - World's first 7nm High Perf x86 CPU

12:52PM EST - CPU Core Execution Enhancements

12:52PM EST - 2nd Gen IF

12:52PM EST - More Security Elements

12:52PM EST - Modular Design

12:53PM EST - Improved pipeline, DOuble loading point and load store

12:53PM EST - Doubled core density

12:53PM EST - Half energy per operation

12:53PM EST - Improved branch predictor

12:53PM EST - Better instruction pre-fetching

12:53PM EST - Re-optimized instruction cache

12:53PM EST - Larger op-cache

12:53PM EST - FP with to 256-bit

12:53PM EST - Doubled load/store bandwidth

12:53PM EST - Increased dispatch/retire

12:53PM EST - Maintained high throughput modes

12:53PM EST - Security

12:53PM EST - Memory Encryption with Increased Flexibility

12:54PM EST - Hardware enhanced spectre mitigations

12:54PM EST - AMD will stay focused

12:54PM EST - Zen introduced a multi-chip approach

12:54PM EST - Enabled configurability, increased peak compute

12:54PM EST - Zen 2 Each IP is its optimal technology

12:54PM EST - 14nm IO die

12:54PM EST - 7nm CPU chiplets

12:54PM EST - Optimized IO die improves latency and power

12:54PM EST - Revolutionary new approach

12:54PM EST - Others in the industry will adopt this approach

12:54PM EST - Perf is holistic - the process technology and design all helps

12:54PM EST - Seizing the opportunity

12:54PM EST - Zen 4

12:54PM EST - Momentum is now on AMD

12:56PM EST - Now talking GPU

12:56PM EST - Radeon MI60 optimized for datacenter

12:57PM EST - World's first 7nm GPU

12:57PM EST - Flexible Vega architecture

12:57PM EST - Leading edge memory

12:58PM EST - Industry's only hardware-virtualized GPU

12:58PM EST - 13.2B transistors, 331 mm2

12:58PM EST - Double density, 1.25x perf at same power

12:59PM EST - 50% lower power at same freq

12:59PM EST - FP32 and GP64

01:00PM EST - Special ML operations for training and inference

01:00PM EST - end-to-end ECC

01:01PM EST - 32GB of HBM2

01:01PM EST - 1TB/s bandwidth

01:02PM EST - Enterprise class reliability

01:02PM EST - PCIe 4.0 !

01:02PM EST - 64 GB/s Bidirectional CPU to GPU

01:03PM EST - Infinity Fabric GPU to GPU at 100 GB/s per link

01:03PM EST - Infinity Fabric GPU to GPU at 100 GB/s per link

01:03PM EST - Without bridges or switches

01:03PM EST - Connected in a ring

01:03PM EST - Helps scaling multiGPU

01:04PM EST - Hardware virtualization without software overhead

01:04PM EST - data isolation

01:04PM EST - Many VMs per GPU

01:04PM EST - Scale up with multiple GPUs

01:04PM EST - One GPU to 16 VMs, or one VM to 8 GPUs

01:04PM EST - No licence fee

01:05PM EST - Comes with the hardware

01:05PM EST - ROCm open source software

01:05PM EST - ML framework

01:05PM EST - Open source enables community participation

01:06PM EST - ROCm works on NVIDIA GPU and Intel CPU

01:06PM EST - Announcing ROCm 2.0

01:06PM EST - Comes with MI60

01:07PM EST - Latest updated ML Frameworks and Math libraries

01:07PM EST - Dockers and Kubernetes support

01:07PM EST - Upstreamed for Linux Kernel

01:07PM EST - That's pretty important

01:08PM EST - Working with Google on TensorFlow, Baidu on PaddlePaddle, Facebook with Caffe/PyTorch

01:11PM EST - Performance

01:11PM EST - 8.8x DGEMM faster

01:21PM EST - Demo time

01:22PM EST - AMD CPU + GPU for ML difficult problems

01:22PM EST - 118 TOPS INT4

01:24PM EST - 14.7 TFLOPS FP32

01:24PM EST - 7.4 TGLOPS FP64

01:29PM EST - Ryan here: apologies for the site issues. Apparently you're all very eager to hear about Zen and Vega

01:31PM EST - Meanwhile AMD is on a 20 minute break. So here's a good time to refill your coffee

01:53PM EST - Here we go

01:53PM EST - '64 cores' - was that an announcement

01:53PM EST - 33% better memory bandwidth

01:54PM EST - Forrest Norrod on stage

01:54PM EST - video time

01:55PM EST - Going through EPYC state of affairs and use cases

01:56PM EST - Differentiated services

01:56PM EST - Advantages of EPYC with cores, perf, scalability

01:56PM EST - even single socket deployments

01:57PM EST - Azure has LV series for storage/IO intensive

01:57PM EST - Azure has Hb series for high perf

01:57PM EST - Amazon is going broad

01:57PM EST - M and T instances for general purpose

01:57PM EST - R instances for memory optimized perf

01:58PM EST - Oracle offers virtualized and bare metal

01:58PM EST - different deployment models

01:59PM EST - Up to 60% lower cost per core hour

01:59PM EST - 32 cores in a single socket is really disruptive for managed services

02:00PM EST - Baidu runs single socket EPYC replacing legacy dual socket platforms

02:00PM EST - Single socket efficiency is the right match for them

02:00PM EST - Tencent is offering AMD internally and externally for differentiated TCO

02:01PM EST - Seemless transition to AMD EPYC instances

02:01PM EST - EPYC is great for virtualized environments

02:01PM EST - AMD has best in class price/perf for virtualization

02:02PM EST - under industry standard benchmarks

02:02PM EST - VMWare Barcelona this week

02:02PM EST - VMware working closely with AMD

02:03PM EST - VMware to allow AMD customers to work with VMware licences very easily

02:03PM EST - Hyperconvergence for OpEx savings

02:03PM EST - Day-zero support for new technologies on VMware

02:04PM EST - embracing a strategy to redefine the server

02:04PM EST - Replacing the typical 2000 core datacenter deployment

02:04PM EST - Data is very consistent on this

02:05PM EST - As the infrastructure ages, perf goes down and admin costs goes up

02:05PM EST - time to reclaim perf

02:06PM EST - cost-for-cost replacement would be 2S Intel Gold 5118 - 24 core

02:06PM EST - EPYC gives you single socket EPYC 7551P 32 cores with 2TB DRAM support for same price

02:07PM EST - Distruptive TCO: 26% less admin, 29% less hardware, 63% licensing, saves 63% space

02:07PM EST - 45% lower TCO (cost per year per VM

02:09PM EST - EPYC #1 SPECrate2017_fp_peak 2P

02:10PM EST - 44% better weather modelling, 25% faster fluent, 41% faster NAMD

02:10PM EST - Cray to the stage

02:10PM EST - Cray and AMD just announced Shasta, an AMD EPYC based supercomputer

02:11PM EST - Titan with 300k Opteron cores is still #7 on the TOP500

02:12PM EST - Haas F1 team is using Cray CS500 for CFD testing

02:12PM EST - (woohoo)

02:13PM EST - Cray's customers want to run a variety of applications from AI to analytics

02:13PM EST - Shasta allows customers to do both on a single deployment

02:13PM EST - New Cray interconnect called Slingshot

02:14PM EST - NERSC / Lawrence Berkeley has $126m contract for a Shasta

02:15PM EST - 100 PetaFLOP deployment

02:15PM EST - Road to exascale goes through Shasta

02:16PM EST - (sorry, can't upload photos for some reason

02:18PM EST - 'AMD is just getting started'

02:18PM EST - Time for the next horizon announcement

02:19PM EST - Preview of Rome

02:20PM EST - Up to 64 Zen 2 cores, 128 threads

02:20PM EST - Socket compatible with Naples

02:20PM EST - Rome is PCIe 4.0

02:21PM EST - Making the commitment today

02:22PM EST - Performance of Rome:

02:22PM EST - 2x Perf per socket

02:22PM EST - 4x Floating point per socket

02:32PM EST - 8 cores per Zen 2 die

02:33PM EST - Cray benchmark: One socket Rome scored 28.1 seconds, Two 8180M 30.2 seconds

02:33PM EST - Rome air-cooled, non-overclocked, not final frequency

02:34PM EST - On track for 2019

02:35PM EST - That's all for the presetnations. Demos this afternoon

02:35PM EST - I'm going to see what's up with our SQL DB. It needs a kick

02:35PM EST - More info later today

02:35PM EST - .