AMD Next Horizon: Zen 2, 7nm Vega, AMD On Amazon EC2

AMD's "Next Horizon" investor day event is taking place right now in San Francisco. Here are the highlights from this AMD event as we approach the end of 2018.

Highlights so far from this event include:

- AMD EPYC CPUs will be coming online with Amazon AWS' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) starting today for the R5a, M5a, and T3a instance types.

- AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 is the first 7nm Vega GPU.

- The initial preview of the AMD Rome next-gen 7nm EPYC CPU.

- Zen 2 is sampling today while it's on track for being released still in 2019.

- 7nm slated to deliver 2x density improvement, 0.5x power, and greater than 1.25x the performance.

- Zen 3 7nm++ is "on track".

- Zen 2 will have better floating point performance.

- Hardware-enhanced Spectre mitigation for Zen 2 along with other security improvements.

- Zen 2 is using a "revolutionary" chiplet design.

- Zen 4 is in design stages already.

- The Radeon Instinct MI60 (Vega 20) supports hardware virtualization, 2x more density, 50% lower power, and greater than 1.25x higher performance. This GPU offers end-to-end ECC memory protection, and machine learning instructions for training and inference.

- The MI60 with its 32GB HBM2 memory can achieve 1TB/s of memory bandwidth.

- The MI60 supports full PCI Express 4.0 with 64GB/s bi-directional bandwidth and does support Infinity Fabric Links at 100GB/s per link between the EPYC CPU and GPU.

- The ROCm 2.0 compute stack is coming for the MI60. This is the latest open-source Radeon Compute stack for machine learning and more.

- "We are committed to open-source and the open-source community."

- ROCm 2.0 will be out before the end of 2018.