AMD Epyc, Intel Foveros Score Analyst Choice Awards

AMD and Intel were among the winners of the 2019 Analysts’ Choice Awards by The Linley Group for second-generation Epyc processors and Foveros packaging technology, respectively. Habana, Arm and Huawei also won awards.

The Linley Group, a leading supplier of technology analysis in computing, revealed the winners of its Analysts’ Choice Awards on Monday. The awards are meant to recognize the top semiconductor and processor IP of the year. The group selects winners based on the merits of those that entered production during the year, such as performance, power, features and cost. This year, it introduced a new category for best artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator.

AMD’s Rome won in best server or PC processor, meaning that it bested Intel’s Cascade Lake and Ice Lake processors. As we wrote in our launch coverage of Rome: “On paper, the AMD Epyc Rome processors look to be capable performers that marry innovative and often unrivaled features with unprecedented core counts.”

Linely’s newsletter Tuesday also pointed to the 64 cores, as well as PCIe 4.0 support.

“Sporting up to 64 cores, Rome easily grabbed the performance lead in mainstream two-socket servers," it said. "Rome tops Intel’s latest Xeons in cache size and memory bandwidth and is also the first x86 processor with [PCIe 4.0].”

Meanwhile, Intel won in the category for best technology with Foveros, which is used in Intel Lakefield. Foveros is Intel’s innovative 3D stacking technology that for the first time brings vertical integration to logic chips that also could be on different process technologies.

Habana, which Intel acquired at the end of 2019, won in the category of best AI accelerator with its Goya inference chip, presumably winning out above the likes of Intel’s and Huawei’s AI accelerators. 

“On ResNet-50, [Goya] outperforms Nvidia’s T4 by 4x for offline applications and a huge 7x for real-time applications with a batch size of one. Unlike most of Nvidia’s competitors, Habana has demonstrated strong performance on multiple neural networks," The Linley Group explained. 

On the mobile side, Huawei’s Kirin 810 won above Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 730 and MediaTek Helio P90 for its superior performance. Arm’s Mali-G77 was deemed the best licensable GPU, as the first implementation of Arm’s Valhall architecture.

“Our awards program not only recognizes excellence in chip design and innovation, but also acknowledges the products that our analysts believe will have an impact on future designs,” said Linley Gwennap, founder and principal analyst at The Linley Group.

2019 Analysts’ Choice Awards Winners

• Best AI Accelerator: Habana (now part of Intel) Goya processor
• Best Server or PC Processor: AMD’s second-generation Epyc 
• Best Embedded Processor: Syntiant’s NDP101 
• Best Mobile Processor: Huawei’s Kirin 810 
• Best Processor IP: Arm’s Mali-G77 GPU
• Best Networking Chip: Broadcom’s BCM56670 switch chip
• Best Technology: Intel’s Foveros 3D-stacking technology