AMD at its 2025 Advancing AI event name-dropped its two next generations of EPYC server processors to succeed the current EPYC "Turin" powered by Zen 5 microarchitecture. 2026 will see AMD debut the Zen 6 microarchitecture, and its main workhorse for the server segment will be EPYC "Venice." This processor will likely see a generational increase in CPU core counts, increased IPC from the full-sized Zen 6 cores, support for newer ISA, and an updated I/O package. AMD is looking to pack "Venice" with up to 256 CPU cores per package.

AMD is looking to increase the CPU core count per CCD (CPU complex die) with "Zen 6." The company plans to build these CCDs on the 2 nm TSMC N2 process node. The sIOD (server I/O die) of "Venice" implements PCI-Express Gen 6 for a generational doubling in bandwidth to GPUs, SSDs, and NICs. AMD is also claiming memory bandwidth as high as 1.6 TB/s. There are a couple of ways they can go about achieving this, either by increasing the memory clock speeds, or giving the processor a 16-channel DDR5 memory interface, up from the current 12-channel DDR5. The company could also add support for multichannel DIMM standards, such as MR-DIMM and MCR-DIMMs. All said and done, AMD is claiming a 70% increase in multithreaded performance over the current EPYC "Turin," which we assume is comparing the highest performing part to its next-gen successor.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise today announced expansions of its HPE Aruba Networking wired and wireless portfolio, along with new HPE Aruba Networking CX 10K distributed services switches, which feature built-in programmable data processing units (DPU) from AMD Pensando to offload security and network services to free up resources for complex AI workload processing.

The new expansions from HPE Aruba Networking include:

• The HPE Aruba Networking CX 10040 is HPE's latest distributed services switch -- also known as a "smart switch" -- that doubles the scale and performance of the previous networking and security solution.
• Four new HPE Aruba Networking CX 6300M campus networking switches, which provide faster data speeds for enterprise IoT, AI, or high-performance computing with a more compact footprint.
• New Wi-Fi 7 access points (APs) and capabilities for AI-driven indoor and outdoor connectivity that deliver the highest quality of service for data, voice, and video communications.

AMD and HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia's new AI enterprise, today announced a landmark agreement to build the world's most open, scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient AI infrastructure, that will power the future of global intelligence through a network of AMD-based AI computing centers stretching from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States. As part of the agreement, the parties will invest up to $10B to deploy 500 megawatts of AI compute capacity over the next five years. The AI superstructure built by AMD and HUMAIN will be open by design, accessible at scale, and optimized to power AI workloads across enterprise, start-up and sovereign markets. HUMAIN will oversee end-to-end delivery, including hyperscale data center, sustainable power systems, and global fiber interconnects, and AMD will provide the full spectrum of the AMD AI compute portfolio and the AMD ROCm open software ecosystem.

"At AMD, we have a bold vision to enable the future of AI everywhere—bringing open, high-performance computing to every developer, AI start-up and enterprise around the world," said Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO, AMD. "Our investment with HUMAIN is a significant milestone in advancing global AI infrastructure. Together, we are building a globally significant AI platform that delivers performance, openness and reach at unprecedented levels." With initial deployments already underway across key global regions, the collaboration is on track to activate multi-exaflop capacity by early 2026, supported by next-gen AI silicon, modular data center zones, and a developer-enablement focused software platform stack built around open standards and interoperability.

To effectively train and deploy generative AI, large language models, or agentic AI, it's crucial to build parallel computing infrastructure that offers the best performance to meet the demands of AI/ML workloads but also offers the kind of flexibility that the future of AI demands. A key aspect for consideration is the ability to scale-out the intra-node GPU-GPU communication network in the data center.

At AMD, we believe in preserving customer choice by providing customers with easily scalable solutions that work across an open ecosystem, reducing total cost of ownership—without sacrificing performance. Remaining true to that ethos, last October, we announced the upcoming release of the new AMD Pensando Pollara 400 AI NIC. Today we're excited to share the industry's first fully programmable AI NIC designed with developing Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) standards and features is available for purchase now. So, how has the Pensando Pollara 400 AI NIC been uniquely designed to accelerate AI workloads at scale?

Today, at VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, AMD continued to showcase its proven performance and growing adoption of AMD EPYC CPUs, AMD Pensando data processing units (DPUs) and adaptive computing products as ideal solutions for the most efficient and innovative virtualized environments. For instance, a system powered by a 4th Gen AMD EPYC 9654 CPUs and a Pensando DPU, delivers approximately 3.3x the Redis application performance and 1.75x the aggregate network throughput when compared to a 4th Gen EPYC system with standard NICs. Additionally, servers with 2P 4th Gen EPYC 9654 CPUs alone can enable using up to 35% fewer servers in an environment running 2000 virtual machines (VMs) compared to 2P Intel Xeon 8490H based servers.

"AMD is helping enterprise customers fully realize the benefits of their virtualized data centers with the latest generation EPYC CPUs and Pensando DPUs," said Forrest Norrod, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions Business Group, AMD. "Consolidation and modernization enable businesses to increase server utilization and efficiency while delivering impressive performance for critical enterprise workloads. Our ongoing collaboration with VMware enables customers to get more efficient and agile to reach their digital transformation goals."

Today, at the "Data Center and AI Technology Premiere," AMD announced the products, strategy and ecosystem partners that will shape the future of computing, highlighting the next phase of data center innovation. AMD was joined on stage with executives from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Citadel, Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft Azure and PyTorch to showcase the technological partnerships with industry leaders to bring the next generation of high performance CPU and AI accelerator solutions to market.

"Today, we took another significant step forward in our data center strategy as we expanded our 4th Gen EPYC processor family with new leadership solutions for cloud and technical computing workloads and announced new public instances and internal deployments with the largest cloud providers," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "AI is the defining technology shaping the next generation of computing and the largest strategic growth opportunity for AMD. We are laser focused on accelerating the deployment of AMD AI platforms at scale in the data center, led by the launch of our Instinct MI300 accelerators planned for later this year and the growing ecosystem of enterprise-ready AI software optimized for our hardware."

According to the latest TrendForce statistics, revenue of the top ten global IC design houses reached US$39.56 billion in 2Q22, growing 32% YoY. Growth was primarily driven by demand for data centers, networking, IoT, and high-end product portfolios. AMD achieved synergy through mergers and acquisitions. In addition to climbing to third place, the company also posted the highest annual revenue growth rate in 2Q22 at 70%.

Qualcomm continues in the No. 1 position worldwide, exhibiting growth in the mobile phone, RF front-end, automotive, and IoT sectors. Sales of mid/low-end mobile phone APs were weak but demand for high-end mobile phone APs was relatively stable. Company revenue reached US$9.38 billion, or 45% growth YoY. NVIDIA benefitted from expanded application of GPUs in data centers to expand this product category's revenue share past the 50% mark to 53.5%, making up for the 13% YoY slump in its game application business, bringing total revenue to US$7.09 billion, though annual growth rate slowed to 21%. AMD reorganized its business after the addition of Xilinx and Pensando. The company's embedded division revenue increased by 2,228% YoY. In addition, its data center department also made a considerable contribution. AMD posted revenue of US$6.55 billion, achieving 70% growth YoY, highest amongst the top ten. Broadcom's sales performance in semiconductor solutions remained solid and demand for cloud services, data centers, and networking is quite strong. The company's purchase order backlog is still increasing with 2Q22 revenue reaching US$6.49 billion, an annual growth rate of 31%.

AMD announced that the AMD Pensando Distributed Services Card, powered by the industry's most advanced data processing unit (DPU)1, will be one of the first DPU solutions to support VMware vSphere 8 available from leading server vendors including Dell Technologies, HPE and Lenovo.

As data center applications grow in scale and sophistication, the resulting workloads increase the demand on infrastructure services as well as crucial CPU resources. VMware vSphere 8 aims to reimagine IT infrastructure as a composable architecture with a goal of offloading infrastructure workloads such as networking, storage, and security from the CPU by leveraging the new vSphere Distributed Services Engine, freeing up valuable CPU cycles to be used for business functions and revenue generating applications.

AMD today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Pensando for approximately $1.9 billion before working capital and other adjustments. Pensando's distributed services platform includes a high-performance, fully programmable packet processor and comprehensive software stack that accelerate networking, security, storage and other services for cloud, enterprise and edge applications.

"To build a leading-edge data center with the best performance, security, flexibility and lowest total cost of ownership requires a wide range of compute engines," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD chair and CEO. "All major cloud and OEM customers have adopted EPYC processors to power their data center offerings. Today, with our acquisition of Pensando, we add a leading distributed services platform to our high-performance CPU, GPU, FPGA and adaptive SoC portfolio. The Pensando team brings world-class expertise and a proven track record of innovation at the chip, software and platform level which expands our ability to offer leadership solutions for our cloud, enterprise and edge customers."