Amd presents the snowy owl soc that will compete against xeon

AMD returned to the high-end market segment with new CPU and GPU architectures with Zen and Vega respectively. Now the red company is preparing a new platform called Snowy Owl, a SoC (System on Chip) that will be part of the EPYC 3000 processors.

Snowy Owl, The new SoC processor will be part of the EPYC 3000 series

AMD is targeting all market sectors, including conventional desktops (Ryzen 3/5/7) , high-end desktops (Threadripper) , mobiles (Ryzen 5 Mobile or Raven Ridge), and servers (Epyc) . Building on this latter segment, AMD is preparing a new Snowy Owl platform for embedded applications (SoC) .

Snowy Owl is the code name for Epyc 3251, an Epyc 3000 series chip that will be AMD's first Zen-based SoC. This new SoC will be integrated with the SP4r2 BGA socket, and due to its appearance, it will be the most powerful SoC solution that exists. This is not too surprising, since Snowy Owl is basically a reduced version of Naples (Eypc 7601 and so on), which in turn fits 32 cores.

It is known that there will be two categories of Snowy Owl, a single-chip module (SCM) that can scale up to 8 cores and 16 threads, and a multichip module (MCM) that can scale up to a maximum of 16 cores and 32 threads. These will compete with Intel's Xeon-D family in the x86 solution space.

The advantages over Intel Xeon-D

Snowy Owl offers some clear advantages over Xeon-D. While the maximum number of cores and threads is the same between the two (up to 16 cores and 32 threads), Snowy Owl supports four channel memory, Xeon-D only supports two channel memory. AMD's integrated solution also provides more cache (32MB of L3 cache vs. 24MB), and twice as many PCI Express lanes at 64 instead of 32.

This new AMD platform will be ready in 2018.

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