AMD has revealed that it's now sampling its next-generation Zen 5 CPUs to partners including Turin "EPYC" & Strix "Ryzen" processors.
AMD's Next-Gen Zen 5 CPUs For EPYC "Turin" & Ryzen "Strix" Are Now Sampling, MI300 Refreshes Hinted Again
AMD posted its Q1 2024 earnings a couple of hours ago, highlighting strong sales in the data center segment. During the earnings call, AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, gave a brief report of where the company is currently and where it is headed. This year will be all about Zen 5 as it enters both the client & data center segments.
AMD seems to be betting it all on Data centers in 2024 by accelerating their EPYC CPU and Instinct GPU roadmaps. On the CPU side, the AMD Zen 5 core architecture will play a big role which will be powering two major product families, the EPYC "Turin" and Ryzen "Strix". These two chips are said to be sampling to partners now and launch is expected sometime in the second half of this year.
Our priorities for 2024 are very clear: accelerate our data center growth by ramping instinct GPU production and gaining share with our EPYC processors. Launch our next-generation Zen 5 PC and server processors that extend our leadership performance and expand our adaptive computing portfolio with differentiated solutions.
Dr. Lisa Su - CEO (AMD)
Starting with the AMD EPYC Turin CPUs first, the family will be the first EPYC lineup to feature the brand new Zen 5 cores. These CPUs are being widely sampled by customers and partners and it is reported that the silicon looks great. Lisa Su mentions that the EPYC Turin CPUs provide significant gains in performance and efficiency which will help drive their server market share even further.
AMD's partners are already developing more than 30% of platforms powered by the 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" CPUs and these will be introduced later this year. In a recent roadmap, AMD confirmed that EPYC Turin CPUs will offer drop-in upgradability with existing 4th Gen EPYC servers on the SP5 & SP6 platforms. We are expecting to see up to 128 Zen 5 and 192 Zen 5C core offerings in the family.
Looking ahead, we're very excited about our next-gen Turin family of EPYC processors featuring our Zen 5 core.
We're widely sampling Turin, and the silicon is looking great. In the cloud, the significant performance and efficiency increases of Turin position us well to capture an even larger share of both first and third-party workloads. In addition, there are 30% more Turin platforms in development from our server partners, compared to fourth-gen EPYC platforms, increasing our enterprise and with new solutions optimized for additional workloads. Turin remains on track to launch later this year.
Dr. Lisa Su - CEO (AMD)
Moving over to the client, AMD is positioning its Ryzen Strix APUs as the "next major step" in its AI PC roadmap. AMD's Strix APUs will be a very important product for the company in its client offerings, targeting the premium market segment with a mix of next-gen core IPs including Zen 5 CPU, RDNA 3+ GPU, and XDNA 2 NPU cores, all packed under a single roof. The Strix APUs will be launched in the second half of this year.
Based on what we know, AMD's Ryzen Strix APUs will come in two flavors, a higher-end chiplet, and a standard monolithic die. The former will be aimed at the enthusiast segment while the latter will be designed for thin and light platforms while offering significant performance increases. The NPU performance is already stated to be 3 times faster than the existing Ryzen Hawk "8040" APUs. AMD also expects to launch more mainstream product families as it moves into 2025 such as the Ryzen Kraken APUs.
We will also take the next major step in our AI PC road map later this year with the launch of our next-generation Ryzen mobile processors code named Strix. Customer interest in Strix is very high based on the significant performance and energy efficiency uplifts we are delivering. Design win momentum for premium notebooks is outpacing prior generations as Strix enables next-generation AI experiences in laptops that are thinner, lighter and faster than ever before.
The AI PC products, when we look at the Strix products, it's -- they're really well suited for the premium segments of the market. And I think that's where you're going to see some of the AI PC content strongest in the beginning. And then as we go into 2025, you would see it more across the rest of the portfolio.
Dr. Lisa Su - CEO (AMD)
As far as sales and revenue are concerned, the data center took the lead, reporting strong growth on both the EPYC CPU and Instinct GPU front. While AMD's EPYC CPUs moved the bulk of the share, the Instinct MI300 series became the fastest ramping product in AMD's history, surpassing $1 Billion in sales in under two quarters. AMD reports that more partners are developing servers with the new MI300 accelerators and that they are expecting even better growth in the coming quarters.
AMD also highlights that they are seeing market share gains on the server CPU side of things which is going to help them out. AMD currently has a server market share between 25-30% which will be expanded further with EPYC+Instinct combo servers and the launch of future variants like Turin later this year.
Turning to our broader data center portfolio, we delivered our second straight quarter of record data center GPU revenue as MI300 became the fastest ramping product in AMD history, passing $1 billion in total sales in less than two quarters. In cloud, MI300x production deployments expanded at Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle to power generative AI training and inferencing for both internal workloads and a broad set of public offerings.
For the enterprise, we're working very closely with Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro, and others as multiple MI300x platforms enter volume production this quarter. In addition, we have more than 100 enterprise and AI customers actively developing or deploying MI300x.
Data center segment revenue grew 80% year-over-year and 2% sequentially to a record $2.3 billion. The substantial year-over-year growth was driven by the strong ramp of AMD Instinct MI300X GPU shipments and a double-digit percentage increase in server CPU sales.
We believe we gained server CPU revenue share in the seasonally downed first quarter, led by growth in enterprise adoption and expanded cloud deployments.
Dr. Lisa Su - CEO (AMD)
We have been reporting about the refreshed variants of the Instinct MI300 lineup and these were hinted at once again during the earnings call. Lisa Su said that they have both the follow-ons to the MI300 as well as the next-generation "MI400", in development. The chiplet and CoWoS packaging technologies allow Instinct to be a flexible product and with reports of Samsung signing a $3 Billion deal with AMD for its HBM3E technology, it looks like we will soon see the MI350 and MI370 accelerators being announced for the AI segment with a launch expected between the end of this year and early next year.
So we have the follow-ons to MI300 as well as the next, next generations well in development. Our chiplet architecture is actually very flexible. And so that allows us to actually make changes to the road map as necessary. So we're very confident in our ability to continue to be very competitive.
Right now, I think MI300x is in a sweet spot for inference, very, very strong inference performance. I see as we bring in additional products later this year into 2025, that, that will continue to be a strong spot for us. And then we're also enhancing our training performance and our software road map to go along with it. So more details to come in the coming months, but we have a strong road map that goes through the next couple of years, and it is informed by just a lot of learning in working with our top customers.
Dr. Lisa Su - CEO (AMD)
Lastly, AMD sheds some light on the gaming side of things. The segment saw the biggest decline and it looks like things aren't looking that great in the coming quarter as well. It is stated that the second half of the year will be even lower than the first half and that Q2 is going to be down by a lot too. AMD did launch some new Radeon GPUs in the first half of 2024, mainly the Radeon 7600 XT and the Radeon RX 7900 GRE for global markets but the reception hasn't been that strong. The console side "Semi-Custom" isn't that great either.
We actually think the second-half will be lower than first-half that's basically how we're looking at this year for the gaming business. And at the same time, Gaming's gross margin is lower than our company average. So overall, will help the mix on the gross margin side, that's just some color on the gaming side. But you're right, Q2 game is down a lot.
Jean Hu - Executive Vice President (AMD)
Well that's all for Q1 but moving forward, AMD has its Computex 2024 keynote planned for early June where it will be talking and introducing new product families with the main highlight being its Ryzen 9000 Desktop CPUs which usher a new era in the high-performance computing, and gaming segment.
