Wednesday, November 20th 2024
AMD Custom Makes CPUs for Azure: 88 "Zen 4" Cores and HBM3 Memory
Microsoft has announced its new Azure HBv5 virtual machines, featuring unique custom hardware made by AMD. CEO Satya Nadella made the announcement during Microsoft Ignite, introducing a custom-designed AMD processor solution that achieves remarkable performance metrics. The new HBv5 virtual machines deliver an extraordinary 6.9 TB/s of memory bandwidth, utilizing four specialized AMD processors equipped with HBM3 technology. This represents an eightfold improvement over existing cloud alternatives and a staggering 20-fold increase compared to previous Azure HBv3 configurations. Each HBv5 virtual machine boasts impressive specifications, including up to 352 AMD EPYC "Zen4" CPU cores capable of reaching 4 GHz peak frequencies. The system provides users with 400-450 GB of HBM3 RAM and features doubled Infinity Fabric bandwidth compared to any previous AMD EPYC server platform. Given that each VM had four CPUs, this yields 88 Zen 4 cores per CPU socket, with 9 GB of memory per core.
The architecture includes 800 Gb/s of NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand connectivity and 14 TB of local NVMe SSD storage. The development marks a strategic shift in addressing memory performance limitations, which Microsoft identifies as a critical bottleneck in HPC applications. This custom design particularly benefits sectors requiring intensive computational resources, including automotive design, aerospace simulation, weather modeling, and energy research. While the CPU appears custom-designed for Microsoft's needs, it bears similarities to previously rumored AMD processors, suggesting a possible connection to the speculated MI300C chip architecture. The system's design choices, including disabled SMT and single-tenant configuration, clearly focus on optimizing performance for specific HPC workloads. If readers can recall, Intel also made customized Xeons for AWS and their needs, which is normal in the hyperscaler space, given they drive most of the revenue.
Source:
Microsoft
The architecture includes 800 Gb/s of NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand connectivity and 14 TB of local NVMe SSD storage. The development marks a strategic shift in addressing memory performance limitations, which Microsoft identifies as a critical bottleneck in HPC applications. This custom design particularly benefits sectors requiring intensive computational resources, including automotive design, aerospace simulation, weather modeling, and energy research. While the CPU appears custom-designed for Microsoft's needs, it bears similarities to previously rumored AMD processors, suggesting a possible connection to the speculated MI300C chip architecture. The system's design choices, including disabled SMT and single-tenant configuration, clearly focus on optimizing performance for specific HPC workloads. If readers can recall, Intel also made customized Xeons for AWS and their needs, which is normal in the hyperscaler space, given they drive most of the revenue.
20 Comments on AMD Custom Makes CPUs for Azure: 88 "Zen 4" Cores and HBM3 Memory
And that’s two custom processors for MS from AMD: this one and the one in the Xbox. It seems weird that MS went with Qualcomm instead of another AMD custom chip in their Surface series.
Everybody does it, only custom designs are usually around ARM instead of x86.
Could you imagine what Strix Halo would be like if it had 16GB of integrated HBM3 in ADDITION to between 32GB - 128GB of soldered LPDDR5X at 7500+MT/s....it'd be crazy...and expensive.....unfortunately however, because AI has an insatiable thirst for HBM, it'll never be feasible to use it in a consumer product for the foreseeable future.
ServeTheHome has actually posted about this:
www.servethehome.com/this-is-the-microsoft-azure-hbv5-and-amd-mi300c-nvidia/
MI300C CPU, basically a MI300A with the GPU die replaced with more cores, for a total of 96 cores (with SMT disabled since that's better for HPC).
So neither that Azure service nor that CPU will end up being directly used by mainstream consumers in any way.
FWIW, Intel has a similar product with their Xeon MAX lineup, albeit this one has way less HBM memory than the CPU at hand.
The Mellanox magic and currently the only 800gbit InfiniBand on the market.
AMD is part of the ultra eth consortium but the first products are not quite out yet and MS has its own nics. Odd choice but not unexpected to just use some Mellanox IB.
Each APU (now just cpu) has 16 gen5 lanes for a nic, so that there is symmetric loading and scaling.
Hence each socket gets its own nic. They don't talk to each other over that nic, they have their own fabric.
You are reading things you do not understand and arguing with those that do lol.
Try another article that might enhance your understanding of the system.
www.servethehome.com/this-is-the-microsoft-azure-hbv5-and-amd-mi300c-nvidia/