AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa STH Editors Choice Award Winner 2022

The STH Editor's Choice Award is not given lightly. Indeed, if you check The STH Editors Choice Award Winners, this is an award we have not given out since December 2020. Today, we have our first award handed out in two years. This one goes to the AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa.

Transitioning to the new generation of servers was a major leap for AMD. The cores shrunk to 5nm and we get an increase in the per-socket core count of 50%. That is one of the largest increases we have seen in a long time.

Beyond the increase in core count, AMD EPYC Genoa also had a number of platform modifications. Those include 50% more memory channels and now using DDR5 instead of DDR4, CXL 1.1 Type-3 device (memory expander) support, PCIe Gen5, and an increase in lower-speed I/O lanes. While it is easy to say "More cores, More better" the reality is that we saw a massive jump in core counts during a platform overhaul cycle.

The impact of these machines is becoming apparent. Thermals on the new chips have gone up substantially and we now see AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa parts using around 3x the power of mainstream Xeon processors from a decade ago, albeit with 12x the core count and much more memory and I/O bandwidth. Perhaps the strangest part is that this is not the highest performance, nor the highest core count processor for the initial AMD SP5 socket generation with Genoa-X and Bergamo coming.

Congratulations to the AMD team on delivering an awesome product line here. The AMD EPYC 9004 series clearly stands above its current competition.

As the first Editor's Choice Award given in two years, the AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa series felt like it was a deserving engineering achievement.