AMD has entered a strategic partnership with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in which the company seems poised to see its EPYC processors powering the latest and greatest when it comes to man-made incursions into the secrets of the universe. AMD's 2nd Gen EPYC 7742 processors are already being deployed in CERN's current Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a physics-defying particle accelerator. The LHC has already given us discoveries as important as the Higgs-Boson - a fundamental particle that has given profound insight into the workings of the Universe according to the Standard Model, and the discovery of which garnered the 2013 Nobel Prize for physics.

The current LHC is a 17-mile-long (27 km) underground ring of superconducting magnets housed in a pipe-like structure, or cryostat, which is cooled to temperatures just above absolute zero. Every single particle collision in the LHC generates some 40 TB/s of data that has to be stored, analyzed, and its irrelevant components discarded so as to generate usable data (all in the name of science). Even as AMD's EPYC 2 lineup is already being used for this effect in the current LHC, CERN has recently announced plans to back a €20bn investment on a second generation Hadron Collider. The Future Circular Collider (FCC), as it is being tentatively called, will be four times the size (over 100 km long) and six times more powerful than the LHC. And you can rest assured that all that data will still need to be processed, at a rate that's likely to increase proportionally to the power of the Future Circular Collider. Whether AMD will be the chosen partner for the hardware needed for this task remains unclear, but the fact that AMD's products are already being used in the current LHC could spell a very relevant outcome for AMD's financials in the future. Not to mention the earned bragging rights on account of their hardware being used for sciences' most extraordinary feats.