Exploring AMD’s 5th Gen EPYC

AMD has officially introduced its 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors, previously known under the codename “Turin,” positioning them as the world’s best server CPUs for enterprise, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud-based industrial workloads. These new processors, built on the cutting-edge Zen 5 core architecture, offer a remarkable range of core counts, spanning from 8 to 192 cores, and are fully compatible with the widely deployed SP5 platform. This flexibility ensures that industries across the globe can achieve significant improvements in performance, efficiency, and energy consumption. In fact, the top-tier 192-core CPU offers up to 2.7 times the performance of competing server CPUs.

Among the standout features of this series is the AMD EPYC 9575F, a 64-core processor designed specifically for GPU-powered AI solutions. With a boost clock of up to 5GHz, it offers an impressive 28% faster processing capability than its nearest competitors, ensuring that demanding AI workloads are handled with greater speed and efficiency. This is especially crucial for industries relying on advanced AI applications, such as smart manufacturing, autonomous systems, and predictive maintenance in energy and industrial automation.

Dan McNamara, Senior Vice President and General Manager of AMD’s server business recently said “From powering the world’s fastest supercomputers to supporting leading enterprises and the largest hyperscalers, AMD has earned the trust of customers who value demonstrated performance, innovation, and energy efficiency. With five generations of on-time roadmap execution, AMD has proven it can meet the needs of the data centre market, giving customers the standard for performance, efficiency, and capabilities in cloud, enterprise, and AI workloads.”

In the realm of industrial data centres, today’s operations require processors capable of handling diverse and ever-increasing workloads. These workloads span from AI-driven initiatives to cloud-based infrastructures and the most critical industrial applications, including real-time automation, predictive analytics, and sensor-driven monitoring systems.

The 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors are tailor-made to meet these needs, with Zen 5 core architecture delivering up to 17% improved Instructions Per Clock (IPC) for cloud and enterprise workloads, and up to 37% higher IPC in AI and high-performance computing (HPC) compared to the previous Zen 4 generation. Such performance advancements are instrumental for industries relying on AI-driven technologies and predictive analytics, such as smart factories, automated warehouses, and renewable energy management.

For industrial sectors where speed, accuracy, and reliability are crucial, the AMD EPYC 9965 processor provides significant benefits across diverse applications. When compared to Intel Xeon 8592+ CPU-based servers, AMD EPYC processors demonstrate:

• 4x faster time-to-results on critical business applications like video transcoding, crucial in industries such as media production, broadcasting, and entertainment where rapid data conversion is key to seamless content delivery.
• 3.9x faster time-to-insights for science and HPC applications that solve complex industrial problems in areas such as pharmaceuticals, chemical engineering, aerospace, and automotive design.
• 1.6x higher performance per core in virtualised infrastructure, benefiting industries like telecommunications, cloud services, and financial services, where maximising resource allocation and minimising downtime are key.

These enhancements not only provide faster results but also significantly improve operational efficiency across a variety of sectors. For instance, in the aerospace industry, where simulations of materials and aerodynamics require significant computational power, the improved performance of EPYC processors can drastically reduce simulation times and accelerate product development.

AI is revolutionising industries ranging from manufacturing to healthcare. The ability to make real-time decisions based on large data sets has become a cornerstone of modern industrial operations, whether in predictive maintenance or quality assurance on the production line.

AMD’s 5th Gen EPYC processors deliver industry-leading performance for AI, driving faster insights and quicker deployment of complex AI models. This performance leap is especially beneficial for smart manufacturing, where AI is employed to manage automated production lines, detect anomalies in real time, and optimise supply chain logistics.

Whether the system is purely CPU-driven or a hybrid CPU + GPU solution, the EPYC processors excel in handling AI workloads crucial to applications in autonomous vehicles, robotics, and industrial automation. Compared to competing processors, the 192-core AMD EPYC 9965 offers up to 3.7x the performance on end-to-end AI workloads such as TPCx-AI, providing a more efficient approach to generative AI—a key technology for industries seeking to implement advanced predictive modelling and natural language processing.

In smaller-scale enterprise-class AI models, such as Meta’s Llama 3.1-8B, the EPYC 9965 delivers 1.9x the throughput performance, making it invaluable in research and development sectors, where AI-driven innovations can improve operational efficiencies and facilitate quicker, data-driven decision-making.

In scenarios requiring large-scale AI clusters, such as autonomous vehicles or robotic process automation (RPA) in industrial environments, the EPYC 9575F stands out. Its 5GHz boost frequency enables AI clusters of 1,000 nodes to process up to 700,000 more inference tokens per second, allowing for faster and more accurate AI-driven decisions, which is critical for industries like logistics, transportation, and smart grid management.

The demand for sustainable industrial operations has never been greater. Companies across all sectors are being driven to lower their energy consumption and reduce their carbon footprints, all while maintaining high levels of performance. The 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors play a key role in helping industries meet these environmental goals.

By delivering up to 391,000 SPECrate2017_int_base performance, these processors allow organisations to reduce their power usage by as much as 71% and lower their server count by 87%. This makes the processors highly attractive to industries operating large-scale data centres, such as telecommunications, utilities, and cloud service providers, where reducing energy consumption without compromising performance is critical for maintaining competitive advantage.

The energy-efficient design of the EPYC processors provides significant cost savings and helps industries achieve sustainability targets. For example, in smart city infrastructure and renewable energy management, EPYC processors can be used to optimise sensor-driven monitoring systems, ensuring that energy is used as efficiently as possible, reducing waste, and supporting greener operations.

The 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors are leading the charge in industrial innovation by providing exceptional performance, features, and scalability across key sectors. Already deployed in industries handling the world’s most demanding computing tasks, such as supercomputing, AI, and data analytics, EPYC CPUs enable rapid advancements in energy, automotive, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors.

In healthcare, for instance, EPYC processors are essential in powering medical imaging technologies, where AI-driven diagnostics are used to detect early signs of disease in MRI or CT scans. In manufacturing, these processors are critical to improving robotic automation, where precision and real-time decision-making are crucial to maintaining quality control and productivity.

In terms of IT infrastructure, industries such as banking and financial services rely on the enhanced security features of the EPYC processors, including Trusted I/O for Confidential Computing and FIPS certification (currently in process for the entire 9005 series). These security features ensure that sensitive financial data is protected, and transactions are carried out securely and efficiently across complex systems.

The full lineup of 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors is now available and supported by major hardware vendors including Cisco, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and Supermicro. This widespread adoption ensures that organisations in diverse industries can easily integrate these processors into their current IT environments, providing a seamless upgrade path for those seeking leadership in compute and AI.

The 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors feature:

• 8 to 192 cores per CPU, ensuring flexibility for a wide range of industrial workloads.
• The Zen 5 and Zen 5c core architectures, optimised for multi-threaded performance and scalability.
• 12 channels of DDR5 memory per CPU, with support for DDR5-6400 MT/s for high memory bandwidth, which is critical in data-intensive environments.
• Boost frequencies up to 5GHz, ideal for time-sensitive industrial processes such as real-time analytics in finance or autonomous operations in robotics.
• AVX-512 with full 512b data path for accelerated AI, cryptography, and scientific computations, providing a critical advantage for pharmaceutical research and quantum computing.
• Leading security features, including AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) and Secure Encrypted Virtualisation (SEV), providing peace of mind for industries such as healthcare, government, and telecommunications, where data security is paramount.

The 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors are not just another incremental update—they represent a paradigm shift in industrial computing, delivering leadership in performance, energy efficiency, and scalability. From AI-driven automation to cloud-based infrastructure and data-intensive workloads, these processors set new standards across sectors.

By adopting AMD EPYC processors, industries can expect significant gains in productivity, reduced operational costs, and the ability to drive forward innovation in areas such as autonomous systems, renewable energy, robotic process automation, and more. Whether you’re in manufacturing, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, or financial services, these processors provide the leadership features needed to compete in the modern industrial landscape—ensuring that companies remain agile, efficient, and prepared for the future.