AMD Says 3rd-Gen EPYC Bests Intel’s Latest Xeons, Launches New APUs

The chipmaker brought several announcements to Computex 2021, including new performance claims for its third-generation EPYC CPUs against Intel’s latest Xeon Scalable processors, new Ryzen APUs for desktops, new Radeon graphics for gaming laptops and the new AMD Advantage design framework initiative for OEMs, the latter of which promises to deliver a premium laptop experience for gamers.

AMD came to Computex 2021 with several announcements that included new Ryzen 5000 APUs for consumer and commercial desktops as well as new claims that its third-generation EPYC processors are faster than Intel’s latest Xeon Scalable CPUs.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company also announced the launch of AMD Advantage, a new brand and design framework initiative for OEMs that promises to deliver a premium laptop experience for gamers. In addition, the company launched its new Radeon RX 6000M graphics for gaming laptops and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, an AI-powered technique for boosting graphics performance that will compete with Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling technology, or DLSS.

[Related: AMD’s Q1 Server Gain Against Intel Was Largest Since 2006]

In a pre-briefing with journalists, Robert Hallock, director of product marketing at AMD, said after performing tests comparing its new third-generation EPYC CPUs, code-named Milan, with Intel’s new third-generation Xeon Scalable CPUs, code-named Ice Lake, the company found that EPYC remains the “fastest server CPU on a per-core and per-socket basis.”

“And we still own every one of the 220 performance worlds records that we announced in March, either submitted by AMD directly or submitted by our partners,” Hallock said, adding that EPYC still has “best total cost of ownership in industry when it comes to servers.”

When AMD announced the launch of the Milan CPUs in March, Intel’s Ice Lake processors had yet to launch, which meant that AMD was only able to compare its latest EPYC processors to its rival’s older second-generation Xeon Scalable processors. But Hallock said the new tests solidified AMD’s leadership in the industry and reflected why the company’s data center business has been growing fast.

In one test that AMD was expected to demonstrate during CEO Lisa Su’s keynote at Computex 2021, the company showed that its top Milan CPU could outperform the Intel’s top Ice Lake CPU by 50 percent in ecommerce transactions using dual-socket servers.

“That is why we’re growing. That is why we have all the partnerships that we do with third-gen EPYC,” Hallock said.

New APUs For Consumer, Commercial Desktops

AMD’s new consumer Ryzen 5000G APUs consist of two processors: the eight-core Ryzen 7 5700G and the six-core Ryzen 5 5600G. These processors differ from the company’s main line of Ryzen 5000 desktop processors in that they have integrated graphics. Unlike Intel, AMD leads each new processor generation with CPUs that don’t have integrated graphics and then releases CPUs later on with on-board GPUs, which the company calls accelerated processing units, or APUs.

The Ryzen 7 5700G comes with eight cores, 16 threads, base frequency of 3.8GHz, a boost frequency of 4.6GHz, a 16 MB L3 cache, a 4 MB L2 cache, eight graphics compute units and a 2GHz graphics frequency. The Ryzen 5 5600G comes with six cores, 12 threads, a 3.9GHz base frequency, a 4.4GHz turbo frequency, a 16 MB L3 cache, a 3 MB L2 cache, seven compute units and a 1.9GHz graphics frequency. Both have a thermal design power of 65 watts.

AMD said the Ryzen 7 5700G can outperform Intel’s Core i7-11700 CPU by 9 percent in Adobe PhotoShop, 63 percent in DaVinci Resolve 4K, 22 percent in Blender and 28 percent in the PCMark 10 benchmark. For games, AMD said the Ryzen 7 is 53 percent faster in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, 125 percent in Warframe, 145 percent in Rogue Company and 112 percent in Fortnite.

The company’s new commercial Ryzen Pro 5000 APUs consists of two types: the G-Series for “powerful small form factor PCs” and the GE-Series for “powerful ultrasmall PCs.” The G-Series APUs all have a thermal design power of 65 watts, and they consist of the eight-core Ryzen 7 Pro 5750G, the six-core Ryzen 5 Pro 5650G and the four-core Ryzen 3 Pro 5350G. The GE-Series APUs have a 35-watt TDP, and they consist of the eight-core Ryzen 7 Pro 5750GE, the six-core Ryzen 5 Pro 5650E and the four-core Ryzen 3 Pro 53050GE.

Like other Ryzen Pro processors, the new Ryzen Pro 5000 APUs come with enterprise-level security, manageability and stability features, which includes AMD Memory Guard and AMD Shadow Stack.

“The meta story of [Ryzen] Pro is that it’s an important growth business for AMD, an important growth opportunity for AMD’s CPU business,” Hallock said. He added that the Ryzen Pro business “helps us invest in other areas because Pro customers are repeat customers, they buy large tenders [and] they upgrade pretty frequently in two- or three-year cycles.”

AMD Advantage, Radeon RX 6000M Graphics, FidelityFX

To expand AMD’s leadership in the gaming segment, the company said its new AMD Advantage program is providing engineering support to help OEMs deliver a premium experience for gaming laptops that use AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000M graphics, Ryzen 5000 CPUs and AMD software. The first AMD Advantage laptops will arrive in June from ASUS, HP, Lenovo and MSI.

“We want to set the bar for what a great gaming laptop experience would look like, but then also work with OEMs on designing the next generation of those laptops by providing them a design framework, a set of guidelines, ensuring that the premium performance delivered by Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics cards is felt throughout all the aspects of the laptops experience,” said Sasa Marinkovic, director of gaming marketing at AMD.

This means delivering more than 100 frames per second in many games, more than 10 hours of battery life for video playback, 144Hz refresh rates, high brightness displays and custom-tuned thermals for keeping the keyboard cool, among other things, according to AMD.

Marinkovic said participating OEMs are benefiting from AMD’s engineering resources to ensure the best gaming laptop experiences, and they will also receive marketing support.

The new AMD Advantage laptops will feature the company’s new Radeon RX 6000M graphics, which the company said can deliver up to “1.5 times higher performance or up to 43 percent lower power at the same performance level” compared to the previous generation of RDNA graphics architecture.

The new graphics lineup consists of the Radeon RX 6800M, which comes with 40 compute units and ray accelerators and 12 GB of GDDR6 RAM; the Radeon RX 6700M, which comes with 36 compute units and ray accelerators and 10 GB of GDDR6 RAM; and the Radeon RX 6600M, which comes with 28 compute units and ray accelerators and 8 GB of GDDR6 RAM. The Radeon RX 6800M and Radeon RX 6700M both have a 2,300MHz frequency while the Radeon RX 660M has a 2,177MHz frequency.

These new graphics cards will benefit from the company’s new FidelityFX Super Resolution technology, which will also accelerate graphics performance for hundreds of other AMD CPUs and GPUs as well as GPUs made by Nvidia, according to AMD.

The new open-source technology will offer up to 2.5 times faster performance in “performance” mode than the native resolution of select game titles, but the technology will give users the ability to choose from a total of four different quality settings to balance between performance and image quality.

“We didn’t want to make it proprietary because our strategy has been to bring open source to the gamers and really help game developers further gaming experiences based on the technology that we have,” Marinkovic said.