Over the years, the AMD Zen architecture has been killing everyone in various fields such as servers, desktops, notebooks, game consoles, etc., which has always made Intel unable to hold its head high. However, everything will not be smooth sailing, and the initial stage of Zen family products is also quite difficult. AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster and Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Division Forrest Norrod recently revealed in a program that the initial development of EPYC was not smooth.
After the first-generation EPYC sample code-named Naples returned to the AMD laboratory, the result was that it could not light up, which made the engineers very frustrated and panicked.
Fortunately, after unremitting efforts, the problem was finally solved, the product was successfully launched, and the ice-breaking journey began.
Unexpectedly, the second-generation EPYC code-named Rome also encountered the same situation, and the first batch of samples also failed to light up.
After inspection, it was found that the problem was in memory access, and it was successfully solved.
Norrod revealed that they have developed a 72-hour system. On the one hand, it gives the team enough time to discover and solve problems to avoid collective panic. On the other hand, it also puts a certain amount of pressure on the team. They must solve the problem within a time limit and cannot delay it for a long time.
Nowadays,EPYC processors already account for 23.1% of the server market, and as high as 31.1% in terms of revenue., and before the birth of the Zen architecture, AMD was basically zero in this market.