AMD’s EPYC 9654P – the first of its kind for Genoa CPUs has been spotted in the Geekbench benchmark, with 96 Zen 4 cores running at 3.7 GHz. The AMD EPYC 9654 will be part of the Genoa EPYC 9000 series. This CPU will offer a total of 96 cores and 192 threads, which is the maximum core count for the Genoa series.
To reach 96 cores, AMD will add a total of 12 CCDs to its Genoa chips. Each CCD will have 8 cores based on the Zen 4 architecture.
This is a 50% increase in core and thread count compared to the Milan-X’s 64-core and 128-thread part. But this is not the flagship SKU, as that title is held by EPYC 9664.
The AMD EPYC 9654 “Genoa” CPU features 32MB of L3 cache per CCD, which will be shared among all Zen 4 cores within the CCD, with a total of 1MB of L2 cache per core. This gives us 384MB of L3 cache and 96MB of L2 cache, which combine to give this SKU a huge cache pool of 480MB. For comparison, the top EPYC Milan CPU – EPYC 7763 comes with 256 MB of L3 (32 MB per CCD) and 32 MB of L2 (512 KB per core) for a total of 288 MB of combined cache. The number of caches alone has increased by 67%.
AMD EPYC 9654 (Genoa) – 384 MB L3 (32 MB per CCD) + 96 MB L2 (1MB per core) = 480 MB cache
AMD EPYC 7763 (Milan) – 256 MB L3 (32 MB per CCD) + 32 MB L2 (512KB per core) = 288 MB cache
The CPU is tested on ASUS “RS500A-E12-RS12U” server, which uses the K14PA-U24 series motherboard. The single EPYC 9654P is a “P” SKU, meaning it is designed for a single socket platform. The platform provides 768GB of DDR5-4800 memory and runs on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS operating system.
In terms of performance, the AMD EPYC 9654P Genoa CPU scored 1,467 points in the single-core test and 77,251 points in the multi-core test. Single-core performance is definitely an improvement over Zen 3 CPUs, but it looks like multi-threaded performance isn’t optimized on the platform it’s currently running on.
Taken together, AMD’s EPYC 9000 “Genoa” CPU series for servers will provide a huge performance boost. We’ve seen some 128-core/256-thread configurations beat all current-era server chips, so a dual-socket configuration with 192 cores and 384 threads is sure to break some records. The AMD EPYC 9000 Genoa CPU lineup is expected to enter the server space later this quarter.
