AMD will unveil its EPYC 7003 Milan processors during a live webcast that you can watch here on March 15, 2021, at 11am ET (8am PT), marking the company's first release of processors for the data center based on the Zen 3 architecture. The live stream will include presentations from AMD CEO Lisa Su, CTO Mark Papermaster, and SVP and GM of the data center group, Forrest Norrod.
Update: The NDA has expired. You can see our full breakdown and analysis here, which covers the finer details of the live stream below.
Beyond an accidentally-posted presentation in 2019, AMD hasn't officially revealed many details around its Milan lineup. However, it recently teased a performance benchmark at CES 2021, and a vendor recently posted specifications and pricing for several models.
Early indications suggest that, as with the current-gen EPYC Rome processors, AMD fabs the EPYC Milan chips with the 7nm process, and they top out at 64 cores. The most significant change to the series comes with the infusion of the Zen 3 microarchitecture that lends a 19% in instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput improvement through several changes, like a unified L3 cache and better thermal management that allows the chip to extract more performance within any given TDP range.
Even though we've seen shortages on the consumer side of AMD's business, it has obviously prioritized server chips production. As a result, it has continued to slowly whittle away at Intel's commanding lead in the data center. Faced with unrelenting pressure from a surprisingly nimble competitor, Intel has significantly reduced gen-on-gen pricing with the debut of its Cascade Lake Refresh Xeon models, by 60% in some cases, by slightly adjusting the capabilities of the chips in a way that largely results in a price reduction that comes in the guise of new chips.
To counter, AMD bulked up its EPYC Rome lineup with its workload-optimized 7F and 7H parts, which come with higher power consumption and thermals than the standard 7002 series chips but feature higher frequencies, allowing AMD to challenge Intel's traditional lead in per-core performance.
But now the landscape will change once again. The Milan launch, not to mention Intel's pending 10nm Ice Lake launch, promises to reignite the heated data center competition. You can watch the presentation here live, but be sure to check out our full analysis after the announcement.
