A previous version of the article stated that the 9V64H has 88 cores. AMD has reached out to confirm that it does indeed feature 96 cores. 8 cores (1 of 12 cores) are used for overhead.
Microsoft unveils custom-designed AMD CPUs, available only on Azure, uses ultra-fast HBM memory, also uses Nvidia’s InfiniBand technology
At Ignite today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the new AMD processors, which are set to be the most powerful CPUs running on Azure cloud computing infrastructure, with a few surprises. accompanied. You can request preview access to Azure HBv5 VMs by filling out this form.
The 9V64H is a custom-made 4th generation EPYC server CPU and is not based on the latest 5th generation CPU codenamed Turin. It has 88 cores and operates up to 4 GHz. The closest existing model is the 9634, an 84-core CPU with top speeds of 3.7 GHz.
According to Fernando Aznar, HPC + AI product marketing manager at Microsoft, “Memory bandwidth-intensive applications such as computational fluid dynamics, automotive and aerospace simulation, weather modeling, energy research, molecular dynamics, and computer-aided engineering… “Focus on most HPC applications.” “But nothing is said about AI.
What makes this CPU special is that as part of Azure HBv5 VMs (scheduled to launch in 2025), a cluster of these four clusters will have a combined memory bandwidth of up to 450 GB of RAM (HBM3 in this case). It’s about being accessible. Approximately 7.0TBps.
That’s more than the AMD Instinct MI300A accelerator excluding the GPU part (24 cores, 3.7 GHz peak, 128 GB HBM memory, 5.3 TBps peak performance) and almost 1 more than the rest of the competition (including AMD’s own) This is an order of magnitude higher value.
very unique CPU
But there’s more to it than that. This is AMD’s first quad-socket project, and an interesting take on what AMD told me earlier this year when I interviewed Robert Hormuth, the company’s corporate vice president of architecture and strategy.
Unless there is a clear case to choose quad, and you have a hyperscale client with nearly unlimited funds, single socket is clearly where the market is going.
Microsoft also confirmed that this chip (like the Zen 4c and Zen 5c parts) is SMT disabled, allowing VMs to access a whopping 3.17TB of memory (up to 9GB per core).
And while it’s a co-designed chip, Microsoft turned to AMD’s nemesis Nvidia for its industry-leading Quantum-2 Infiniband networking technology, giving the CPU more bits (800 Gb/s, split). We’re working together to keep the supply flowing, and we’re firmly in control. evenly across the four CPUs).
This allows customers to “efficiently scale workloads to hundreds of thousands of cores” as needed, Microsoft said.
We were also intrigued by the mention of a 14TB local NVMe SSD that delivers up to 50GB/s read and 30GB/s write performance. This is much better than anything commercially available that uses PCIe Gen5 technology, and can only be achieved using specialized hardware such as: Highpoint’s Rocket 1608A Additional Storage Card.
