After revealing Ryzen, AMD has been making waves in the consumer CPU market. With the new Zen architecture, the company has a chance at taking the fight to Intel with a more potent offering. In addition to the consumer releases, AMD is also planning on getting back into the server market. Dubbed Naples, the new platform goes all out and courtesy of some leaks, more details have been revealed.
According to the new information, Naples is expected to have a 32 core 64 thread variant. This is a crazy amount of cores for a single CPU to have and surpasses what even Intel has to offer. To feed the massive CPU, we have 8 channels of memory and 128 PCI Express Gen 3.0 lanes. This allows for up to 32 NVMe storage devices and 4 discrete GPUs for the 1U rack. Moving to 2U, we get 26 NVMe devices and 8 discrete GPUs. As expected of a server platform, both 1U nad 2U can feature 2 CPUs each.
While it’s great for us consumers to have more competition, the enterprise server market is just as important if not more so for AMD. Enterprise customers often buy in massive amounts and keep buying if the products are there. With a larger customer base, AMD will be able to increase their revenue and profits. This means more money for R&D which is currently on a shoestring budget. It will be interesting to see if Naples will be enough to break Intel’s stranglehold on this market.
