AMD EPYC 7H12 Announced As New 280 Watt Processor For High Performance Computing

From Rome, Italy this afternoon AMD not only announced more than 100 world records have been broken with their new EPYC "Rome" processors, but there is also a new SKU! Meet the EPYC 7H12.

The EPYC 7H12 doesn't quite follow the naming convention of the rest of the EPYC Rome line-up announced back in August as it's a special part. The EPYC 7H12 is more akin to Intel's Cascadelake-AP line-up but with more broad availability and just a higher clocked / higher power part as opposed to tacking on extra dies. But it carries the same focus on delivering maximum HPC performance.

The AMD EPYC 7H12 is a 280 Watt SKU, their most power hungry EPYC processor ever, and as such is primarily designed for server deployments with water cooling. Compared to the 225 Watt top-end AMD EPYC 7742, the 7H12 model raises the base frequency from 2.25GHz to 2.6GHz and the boost frequency is 3.3GHz, which is actually 100MHz lower than the 7742 model. But the rest of the specs besides the clock adjustments and TDP are in-line with the EPYC 7742: 64 cores / 128 threads, 256MB L3 cache, 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, 8 x DDR4-3200 memory support.

This water-cooled server processor is, of course, designed for the high performance computing (HPC) use-cases and similar. The EPYC 7742 already easily beats the likes of the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 "Cascade Lake" while the 7H12 with the extra 350MHz on the base frequency should provided an added oomph. In at least Linpack, the EPYC 7H12 delivers around 11% higher performance over the EPYC 7742.

Pricing hasn't been shared yet and, of course, you'll need a specialized server setup to accommodate the 280 Watt TDP.

From the Rome event in Rome, Dell EMC announced their five new PowerEdge servers for these new EPYC CPUs, TSMC themselves are beginning to make use of EPYC processors for R&D, Nokia and IBM Cloud are backing EPYC Rome, and OVHcloud announced they will be providing EPYC 7402P access in the cloud.