AMD Welcomes Cisco to the EPYC™ Processor Family

AMD has scored another partner for their EPYC processors and will be providing processors for new Cisco Rack Server Chassis. This is the first time AMD and Cisco have partnered and AMD is going to help them bring more cores to their servers. This will be Cisco's highest density solution for cloud platforms. If this keeps up AMD is going to significantly erode Intel's market share. Isn't it nice to see competition once again?

“The addition of AMD to the Cisco UCS server portfolio marks a first for us as partners,” said Kaustubh Das, vice president, product management - Computing Systems, Cisco’s Data Center Business Group. “Leveraging the innovation of AMD EPYC, Cisco is bringing forth transformative technology that will enable our customers to accelerate compute-intensive workloads with a high-density server that can be managed from the cloud."

Am I the only one not taking this "rah rah" moment they way it's (typically) intended? What I see is Cisco putting EPYC into a elcheapo product so that they don't tick off Intel. I've seen this sort of thing so many times...

I was deploying Cisco servers at my last job and being able to buy this would have made me so very [H]ard.

Yeah we are starting to roll out some Cisco stuff at my job, and I've honestly been really impressed with their hardware. Good to see AMD making some headway back into the market too.,

I had no idea Cisco made servers. When I think Cisco I think switches, routers, firewalls and wireless access points.

We use Cisco UCS and I am a big fan of the platform.

I been waiting for this for a while now. Going to try get 2 blades to join to our VMware Cluster and compare the performance with some recent M5's and latest Xeon tech.

No doubt. I'm loving these new Epyc machines. More cores per socket at half the cost of Intel machines. Keeping in our budget and still getting the cores I need for our 50+ VMs.

Zarathustra[H] said:

I had no idea Cisco made servers. When I think Cisco I think switches, routers, firewalls and wireless access points.

Click to expand...

Cisco has a the UCS line (Unified Computing System) that is mostly geared around clustered resources. They're good for VM host clusters, but kind of expensive. Plus, the network adapters are defined in "software", so they can be a bit tricky to work with. We have 2 UCS units for our VM hosts, and they both have these weird phantom network adapters that aren't actually hooked up to anything. I'd guess the previous admins tried to software define extra adapters for other VLANs, but then failed to get them configured correctly. The old admins here were not very bright and managed to screw a lot of things up. (The AD replication was set up in 2 separate groups when I arrived, with 2 domain controllers isolated from the others and had not been getting updates for over a year. I fixed that as one of the first things I did.)

I would love to go back to Cisco but Dell has been too aggressive on their pricing in my sector and budget cuts just put them right out of the price range.

Cisco UCS is more than just another server (well at least, it used to be). The UCS chipset allowed memory footprints (for example) that were double the size of regular systems. But it was all Intel centric as well.

I read in another article that these modular Epyc systems were created in response to game streaming server clients. Seems they don't need servers in one big central location. Instead they spread smaller clusters across many more locations to reduce the latency between the servers and the gamers. This smaller, denser modular approach is perfect for them. I wonder if this means Cisco will be offering Epyc/Instinct combinations using infinity fabric in the future to address all of these streamers needs.

The other "edge" solution these are perfect For, according to Cisco, is to be used as base stations for cellular towers. Which is a market AMD is addressing with their embedded 3000 series Epyc chips.