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Reflections on 2021

raghu_nambiar
Staff
Staff
3 0 3,181
‎01-21-2022 12:42 PM

Reflections on 2021

This holiday season gave me time to reflect on 2021 and anticipate 2022. The joy I felt at seeing and spending time with loved ones was accompanied by a deep sense of pride in what my team and I accomplished in 2021 and a renewed determination to carry our successes forward into 2022 as we continue enabling the AMD EPYC ecosystem.

During 2021, we continued to demonstrate the exceptional performance and value of AMD EPYC processors, including expanding the library of world record performance and price-performance leadership results. This work showcased the performance and TCO advantages of 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors across multiple verticals and workloads:

  • Databases and Analytics. Databases play a crucial role across all industry verticals. Today’s data warehouse instances routinely use datasets holding terabytes of information that require summarization, aggregation, maintenance, and manipulation. AMD EPYC processors deliver outstanding performance on Exasol, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SAP (please see footnotes 1-5, below). AMD offers a broad range of processor options optimized for system level performance and core level performance.  Databases licensed on a per-socket basis can benefit from high-core-count AMD EPYC processors, such as the 64-core AMD EPYC 7713 and 7763. Databases licensed on a per-core basis can benefit from AMD EPYC processors with lower core counts and higher frequencies such as the 32-core 75F3, 24-core 74F3, 16-core 73F3, or 8-core 72F3. DBaaS providers who support many customers in a cloud environment should opt for high-core AMD EPYC CPUs.

  • HCI and Virtualization. Enterprises rely on hyperconvergence and virtualization to consolidate traditional workloads. The high core densities found in some AMD EPYC processors (such as the 7763, 7713P, and 7713) implies more virtual machines per server, typically resulting in lower TCO per virtual machine. Consolidation also implies secondary benefits, such as fewer servers and management points, switch ports, cabling, cooling, power, and a smaller datacenter footprint. Further, Confidential Computing is becoming popular in private cloud and hosted environments; AMD SEV technology creates isolated virtual environments that can help enhance security and meet regulatory requirements for industries such as healthcare and financial services. Our technical partnerships with VMware, Nutanix, and Microsoft continue to prove that AMD EPYC processors are an ideal choice for hyperconverged and virtualized deployments.

  • High Performance Computing. HPC impacts day-to-day life across many demanding workloads, such as design, weather forecasting, healthcare, manufacturing and others. AMD offers a wide range of EPYC processors optimized for per-core performance (critical for single-threaded applications) as well as system-level performance (critical for multi-threaded applications and multi-tenant deployments). AMD EPYC processors push the boundaries of HPC and are ideal for these critical applications. For example, oil and gas operators use AMD's EPYC processors to optimize the processing speed of their largest and most complex seismic data volumes. AMD continues to win commercial and exascale HPC deals.

  • Industry Vertical Solutions. The previous bullet points discussed databases, HCI, and HPC, which are relevant across key verticals. Industry vertical solutions bring architecture and solutions to a specific market. For example, healthcare needs to detect anomalies and find correlations in large datasets. Financial services firms are typically frontrunners in adopting new technologies while optimizing domain-specific apps, such as high frequency trading, real time simulations, and fraud detection. The explosion of smart connected devices is driving growth in the telecommunications industry as they strive to improve service (such as by supporting HD, 4K, and emerging 8K video streaming) and retain customers. Horizontal solutions blend the technologies mentioned here. For example, many enterprises rely on a combination of databases, high performance computing, and virtualization.

  • Public Cloud Solutions. We are seeing tremendous traction for AMD EPYC processors in the public cloud space powering both proprietary and third-party software stacks. Today, 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors power instances on Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google GCP, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and ByteDance. The AMD EPYC differentiations available to CSPs include industry-leading core density, high frequencies, memory footprint, I/O capabilities, and on-die AMD Infinity Guard (see footnote 6, below) security features that, when enabled, help prevent unauthorized access to data in use and are ideal for multi-tenant environments such as public clouds.

In 2021, AMD surpassed 200 million EPYC cores shipped. Today, AMD EPYC processors are available in more than 400 cloud instances and more than 100 platforms. None of this could have happened without our many technical partnerships with leading cloud providers (Azure, AWS, Google, IBM, Oracle, and others), OEMs (Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro), and ISVs (Cloudera, DataStax, Microsoft, MongoDB, Nutanix, Oracle, Red Hat, SUSE, TigerGraph, and others). These partnerships continue to grow and develop the AMD EPYC ecosystem.

The sheer effort required to meet—let alone exceed—those goals seemed daunting back then… but the unwavering perseverance and indomitable spirit of the extended team accomplished everything asked of them and more. To all our technology partners, customers and team members who continue to make the impossible seem easy, thank you!

The market and competitive landscape are constantly evolving. Basking in the warmth and relaxation of the holidays recharged my batteries, sharpened my focus, and motivated me to charge boldly into 2022. My entire team looks forward to doubling down on our speed, agility, teamwork, and focus in 2022.

May the new year bring you happiness, fulfillment, love, and prosperity!

References

  1. http://tpc.org/3376 

  2. http://tpc.org/3356

  3. https://www.supermicro.com/solutions/Solution-Brief_SMC-AMD-Oracle-7002-vs-7003.pdf

  4. http://www.tpc.org/5801

  5. https://www.sap.com/dmc/benchmark/2021/Cert21021.pdf

  6. AMD Infinity Guard features vary by EPYC™ Processor generations. Infinity Guard security features must be enabled by server OEMs and/or Cloud Service Providers to operate. Check with your OEM or provider to confirm support of these features. Learn more about Infinity Guard at https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/infinity-guard. GD-183

Raghu Nambiar is a Corporate Vice President of Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions for AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

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About the Author
Raghu Nambiar currently holds the position of Corporate Vice President at AMD, where he leads a global engineering team dedicated to shaping the software and solutions strategy for the company's datacenter business. Before joining AMD, Raghu served as the Chief Technology Officer at Cisco UCS, instrumental in driving its transformation into a leading datacenter compute platform. During his tenure at Hewlett Packard, Raghu made significant contributions as an architect, pioneering several groundbreaking solutions. He is the holder of ten patents, with several more pending approval, and has made extensive academic contributions, including publishing over 75 peer-reviewed papers and 20 books in the LNCS series. Additionally, Raghu has taken on leadership roles in various industry standards committees. Raghu holds dual Master's degrees from the University of Massachusetts and Goa University, complemented by completing an advanced management program at Stanford University.