AMD's EPYC Bergamo & Genoa-X CPUs hit availability yesterday and early reviews have been very positive, citing unbelievable performance in an extremely efficient package.

AMD EPYC Bergamo & Genoa-X CPUs Are Here To Take Charge of Data Center Market: Crush Intel & Arm Chips

The AMD Bergamo and Genoa-X CPUs are part of the EPYC 9004 family which includes the Genoa Classic chips too. While Genoa offers up to 96 cores based on the Zen 4 architecture, the Genoa-X chips add up to 1.1 GB of cache with 3D vertical stacking whereas Bergamo makes use of the new Zen 4C cores which are compute density optimized for the cloud and offer up to 128 core with the same core IP as Zen 4.

Some highlighted features of AMD's Genoa-X CPUs include:

Same Zen 4 High-Performance CoresUp To 96 Cores / 192 ThreadsUp To 1.1 GB of L3 Cache2nd Gen Stacked 3D V-Cache DesignSP5 Socket CompatibilityAMD Infinity GuardUp To 2.9x Faster Than Sapphire RapidsThree EPYC 9004X SKUsOEM Availability In Q3 2023

Some of the features of Bergamo include:

Up To 128 Zen 4C CoresConsistent x86 ISA82 Billion TransistorsGreatest vCPU DensityBest Energy Efficiency35% Smaller Core Die Area With the Same ProcessUp To 2.6x Faster Than Sapphire Rapids In Cloud-Native Workloads

Now a month after their announcement, AMD has finally launched both Bergamo and Genoa-X to customers and expanded their lineup with several SKUs. In the review published by Phoronix, we see that the EPYC 9754 "Bergamo" and EPYC 9684X "Genoa-X" are now the fastest CPUs around. It looks like the extra core count for Bergamo really helps it push beyond the standard Genoa & also the competition. You are getting double the performance of Intel's top Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPU.

AMD EPYC 9754 "Bergamo" CPU Performance (Image Credits: Phoronix):

AMD EPYC 9684X "Genoa-X" CPU Performance (Image Credits: Phoronix):

Even Genoa-X marked a huge upgrade over the Milan-X chips with over a 2x gain when comparing the 2P platforms. Besides some specific benchmarks, the Milan-X chips were able to handily beat Intel's Xeon Max chips with HBM2e such as the 9480 in 2P configuration with the geometric mean of all results showing almost a 2x gain in performance.

Phoronix on AMD Genoa-X CPUs

For those looking to maximize their HPC performance right now, the AMD EPYC 9684X is easily one of the best processors I've looked at in the past 19 years of Phoronix. The larger L3 cache paired with AVX-512, 12 channel DDR5 memory, and other Zen 4 benefits can really deliver phenomenal results in a wide range of high performance computing workloads.

via Phoronix

Phoronix on AMD Bergamo CPUs

Across all of these benchmarks carried out, the EPYC 9754 2P on average had a 385 Watt power draw... In comparison the EPYC 9654 2P had a 447 Watt average and the EPYC 9684X 2P had a 464 Watt average. And need we mention the Xeon Platinum 8490H 60-core processor consuming even more power with a 568 Watt average. The EPYC 9754 power consumption results surpassed my expectations in frankly not expecting Zen 4C to deliver such power efficiency improvements while still performing so well.

via Phoronix

But what's more impressive are the power numbers. AMD's EPYC Bergamo not only offers more cores but is extremely efficient too with its Zen 4C cores. The 2P chips were shown to consume a power of less than 400W (385W) on average which is -32% lower than the Intel chips & -14% lower than the standard Genoa chips. The power consumption with SMT enabled for Bergamo was also just 14W higher on average while delivering some useful performance uplifts in benchmarks that can take advantage of it.

These numbers are simply mindblowing and efficiency has been a strong aspect of AMD's Zen core architecture which is further refined and optimized with the Zen 4C and Zen 4 core designs. Using lower power while offering double the performance of Intel's offerings truly gives Intel a beating in this segment & we doubt if Intel will be able to catch up in the efficiency department anytime soon.

AMD EPYC 9754 "Bergamo" CPU Power (Image Credits: Phoronix):

AMD EPYC 9684X "Genoa-X" CPU Power (Image Credits: Phoronix):

Intel's answer to Bergamo will come next year in the form of the Sierra Forrest chips which will be fabricated on the "Intel 3" process node and offer up to 144 cores. Unlike AMD's option, the Sierra Forrest chips won't be featuring SMT and use 144 threads which could give AMD a big advantage. AMD won't be stopping since they will have EPYC chips based on the Zen 5C cores ready to market sometime around 2024-2025.

This goes off to show just how much progress AMD has made in the server division. The red team is on its way to achieving 30% market share (currently at 25%) and with chips such as this and also the upcoming Siena lineup which will target mainstream servers, we can expect the company to really turn the tables within a few years and grab half or possibly more server market share from Intel.