An Epic Breakthrough: AMD's EPYC Server Processor Wins Its First Public Cloud Customer

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. AMD quest to take on Intel Corporation INTC in the server processor market may finally be yielding fruit. The company announced Tuesday a win with Microsoft Corporation MSFT for its EPYC server processor, which was unveiled in June.

AMD said Microsoft Azure has deployed its EPYC processors in datacenters ahead of preview for its latest L-Series of Virtual Machines, or VM, meant for storage optimized workloads. The Lv2 VM family will leverage the high-core count and connectivity support of the EPYC processor, the company said.

The Lv2-Series instances, based on Microsoft's Project Olympus design, run on the AMD EPYC 7551 processor, with a base core frequency of 2.2 GHz and a maximum single-core turbo frequency of 3.0 GHz. AMD said the processor provides over 33 percent more connectivity than available two-socket solutions, given the support for 128 lanes of PCIe connections per processor.

The Project Olympus design was introduced a year ago as Microsoft's next-gen hyperscale cloud hardware design, which serves as a new model for open source hardware development.

"We think Project Olympus will be the basis for future innovation between Microsoft and AMD, and we look forward to adding more instance types in the future benefiting from the core density, memory bandwidth and I/O capabilities of AMD EPYC processors," Corey Sanders, director of compute, Microsoft Azure said in a press release.

Though the announcement was not totally unexpected, it's still considered a watershed development for AMD and EPYC, Forbes contributor Patrick Moorhead said. For EPYC to be a success, Moorhead thinks major public cloud and commitments and deployments are going to be key.

AMD was trading down about 1 percent on the day at $9.91.

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