AMD's 2nd Gen EPYC processors now available on IBM Cloud bare metal servers

The new processors will provide twice the number of available cores per server compared to previous versions

IBM has teamed up with AMD in efforts to enhance its global cloud infrastructure and the performance of its cloud servers.

The company announced yesterday that its bare metal servers will now be powered by second-generation AMD EPYC processors.

According to IBM, the new processors from AMD will provide twice the number of available cores per server compared to previous versions and will also enable IBM Cloud to deliver throughput for critical compute-intensive workloads, such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, virtualised environments and electronic design automation.

"We are thrilled to launch new IBM Cloud offerings powered by the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs," Satinder Sethi, general manager at IBM Cloud Infrastructure Services, said in a blog post.

According to Sethi, these processors will provide IBM "access to large core scaling, increased memory bandwidth, and some of the highest CPU performance possible for a variety of workloads" while offering the clients greater flexibility to select the best platform to meet the needs of most demanding workloads.

Another big advantage of AMD EPYC processors, according to Sethi, is their security capabilities, including encryption of virtual machine memory and main memory as well as the ability to cryptographically secure the boot process.

IBM's latest dual-socket bare metal servers, which are based on AMD EPYC 7642 processor, will be able to offer customers 96 CPU cores per platform, base clock frequency of 2.3GHz (maximum boost up to 3.3GHz), up to 4TB memory configuration support, eight memory channels per socket, and up to 24 local storage drives. Customers will also have the choice of CentOS, RHEL, MS Server or Ubuntu operating systems.

AMD launched its second generation EPYC family of processors in July last year, claiming that they are better in terms of both price and performance compared to Intel. The second generation EPYC 7000 Series processors, code-named "Rome" came nearly two years after the company launched its first-generation EPYC processors.

Earlier in May, AMD launched its Ryzen 3000 PC CPUs to good reviews, while its Navi GPU technology also helped to reduce the performance gap with Nvidia in the graphics card market.

The new partnership between AMD and IBM is expected to help the chipmaker to expand its presence in the growing cloud market worldwide. The company has already broken Intel ' s stranglehold in the cloud industry, and some analysts believe that AMD ' s share in the data centre server processor market could reach 10 per cent by the end 2020.

Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform are among the cloud providers that are currently using AMD chips.