AMD has developed the EPYC ‘Bergamo’ processor, which is based on the Zen 4c microarchitecture. This processor is specifically designed for cloud data centers and aims to deliver maximum performance per socket while addressing cost constraints imposed by the slowing Moore’s Law. The EPYC ‘Bergamo’ CPU features 128 cores and utilizes the same Socket SP5 as the EPYC ‘Genoa’ CPU, which has 96 cores. The two processors also share similar specifications such as the 12-channel DDR5-4800 memory subsystem and the I/O die named Floyd, which provides 128 PCIe Gen5 lanes.
The design of the EPYC ‘Bergamo’ processor was influenced by various factors including efficiency, power usage, die size, and total cost of ownership (TCO), rather than solely focusing on delivering maximum per-core performance. This approach is partly a response to the emergence of Arm-based data center-grade systems-on-chip (SoCs) from competitors like Ampere, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
The Zen 4c microarchitecture, used in the EPYC ‘Bergamo‘ processor, maintains the same features and instructions-per-clock performance as Zen 4. However, it achieves a 35.4% reduction in core size compared to Zen 4 through various design optimizations. These optimizations include lowering the boost clock targets, reducing the number of physical partitions, utilizing denser SRAM cells, and removing through-silicon vias (TSVs) arrays for 3D V-Cache. These changes enable AMD to fit 128 Zen 4-class cores into the same power envelope as the EPYC ‘Genoa’ processor.
The EPYC ‘Bergamo’ processor consists of eight Vindhya core complex dies (CCDs), each containing 16 Zen 4c cores. Each CCD features two eight-core core complexes (CCX) and 32MB of L3 cache, with 16MB per CCX. This configuration differs from Zen 4, where each CCX has 32MB of L2 cache, resulting in a larger size compared to Zen 4c CCX.
AMD plans to launch two Bergamo processors, the EPYC 9754 with 128 cores and the EPYC 9734 with 112 cores, later this month. It’s expected that AMD will offer custom and semi-custom Bergamo offerings to cater to the specific requirements of operators in exascale data centers.
It features 128 cores and utilizes the same Socket SP5 as the EPYC ‘Genoa’ processor. The design was influenced by factors such as efficiency, power usage, die size, and TCO, rather than solely focusing on delivering maximum per-core performance. The processor consists of eight Vindhya core complex dies (CCDs) each containing 16 Zen 4c cores and 32MB of L3 cache. AMD plans to launch two Bergamo processors, the EPYC 9754 with 128 cores and the EPYC 9734 with 112 cores, later this month.
