AMD: EPYC 'Milan-X' CPUs Will Be Available This Month

Dan McNamara, the senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Server Business Unit, said on Thursday that the company is on track to make its highly anticipated EPYC 7003-series processors with 3D V-Cache generally available in March. The codenamed Milan-X CPUs are sampling with customers, AMD's server chief said. 

"We are sampling [Milan-X] products in GA today, and we are going to launch that product actually at the end of this month," said McNamara at the SIG Annual Tech Conference 2022. "So, we are very, very excited about that." 

The launch of AMD's Milan-X server products at the end of March naturally brings the PC market closer to the launch of the company's Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor enhanced with 3D V-Cache that is aimed at gamers (and which promises to be one of the best CPUs for gaming). 

AMD's EPYC 7003-series 'Milan-X' processors come with an additional 64MB SRAM 3D V-Cache chiplet atop the compute die that connects to it using AMD's proprietary packaging technology featuring through-silicon-vias (TSVs) as well as direct copper-to-copper hybrid bonding.

AMD's 3D V-Cache acts like an extension of the processor's L3 cache and increases its capacity to 768MB. In total, a 64-core Milan-X CPU will have 804MB of cache: 32MB L2, 256MB L3, and 512MB 3D V-Cache.  

Large caches significantly boost the performance of applications that require high memory bandwidth as well as strong single-thread performance. Therefore, AMD's 3D V-Cache will improve the performance of CPUs with high core counts as well as of processors with lower core counts. 

AMD expects its EPYC 7003-series 'Milan-X' CPUs to gain significant performance advantages in high performance computing (HPC) workloads, physics modeling, and electronics design automation (EDA). 

"[Milan-X] is going to deliver up to a 50% performance increase across technical computing workloads like computational fluid dynamics, EDA, and any sort of advanced physics modeling are going to see a tremendous uplift here," said McNamara. "So we are really excited about this family. It is going to triple the amount of cache offered from Milan and the uplift we are seeing, as I mentioned, is pretty dramatic."