AMD Built A Beastly 88-Core EPYC CPU With Monster HBM3 Memory Bandwidth For Microsoft

AMD is a company that is certainly no stranger to building semi-custom processors. Indeed, the semi-custom unit of the company basically kept it afloat for a couple of years before the launch of Ryzen by supplying SoCs to Sony and Microsoft for their 8th-generation game consoles. We haven't seen so much semi-custom work in the datacenter, though—at least, not until now.

This announcement comes not from AMD, but in fact from Microsoft, who is much more interested in telling you about its Azure HBv5 Virtual Machines—cloud computing you can rent with some pretty unique capabilities. We, of course, are much more interested in the hardware behind those capabilities: namely, what Microsoft describes as a custom 4th-generation EPYC chip with high-bandwidth memory (HBM).

In case you didn't know, HBM isn't simply a categorical descriptor, but rather a specific memory technology. It achieves extremely high memory transfer ...