AMD Will Enter Intel's Largest Market With Ryzen Server: "Naples" Could Beat Intel Xeon

Even when AMD's new Zen Architecture will overtake the world of desktops, Intel was never worried. There is Kaby Lake and later on, Cannon Lake that can somehow compete with Ryzen.Their biggest market strength is not in the laptops and mobiles, not even on Desktops. Intel's empire reigns in the Server side of things with its champion Xeon. But there might be a new era as the server version of Ryzen codenamed as "Naples" tries to steal the crown for AMD.

According to Forbes, AMD Ryzen's server platform "Naples" can possibly battle Intel's Xeon when it comes to raw CPU power. Naples will have the Simultaneous Multi-threading (SMT) technology together with its powerful cores. It has 32 cores/ 64-thread and targets data center applications for enterprises and such. While Xeon Naples also has better memory bandwidth and IO throughput than Xeon, which is a big thing for server architectures.

As mentioned before, Naples Input/Output connectivity will be beastly. The server Ryzen will be featuring 8 DDR4 channels of memory controllers. This will make Naples be able to support up to four terabytes of DDR4 RAM. Also, Naples supports higher memory frequency, with Naples' 2400MHz DDR4 versus Intel Xeon's 1866MHz DDR4.

According to Hot Hardware, AMD Naples multi-threaded advantage and more memory bandwidth make it a better performer. In a Demo shown, AMD's 44 core 1866MHz Naples is faster than Intel's 44 core 1866MHz Xeon. The demo was done via Seismic Analysis with 1 Billion sample grid and 10 iterations. AMD Naples performed two times faster than Intel Xeon. When the test was repeated, this time with AMD using 64 cores at 2400 MHz memory frequency, Naples was 2.5 times faster than Xeon. Wit 4x dataset, Xeon won't even finish the task due to insufficient memory.

Overall, AMD Naples has 45A% more cores, 122% more memory bandwidth and 60 % more I/O than its Intel competitor. There is still no price yet. Naples are expected to be available in the second quarter of the year with AMD Ryzen desktop edition.