Jackpot in sight for AMD with Tencent

More than a million servers equipped with AMD EPYC

Tencent has just announced that it has completed work on its new data centre in the Guangdong province in southern China. This giant complex will break many records.

The first concerns its capacity since the site will be able to host more than a million servers. These servers will all be Star Lake “in-house” servers, designed by the Tencent Cloud division and equipped with a 2nd generation AMD EPYC processor (Rome in 7nm). They have been designed and optimized to meet the requirements of cloud computing, storage and networking. The servers benefit from custom optimization to improve their efficiency. Thus Tencent claims a 50% improvement in efficiency…without really being able to compare with any other type of server. However, the company has provided some details compared to its previous generation of servers: a 35% improvement in performance compared to its previous servers equipped with Intel processors is thus noted.

But beyond the servers, it is the whole architecture of the data center that has been the subject of long studies. The construction of the datacenter and its extension would thus be made simpler thanks to a “module” (T-block) architecture. With these methods, the construction cycle of a site would be reduced by more than 80%.

Example of T-Block architecture

In its overall plan to extend this type of equipment to the rest of China, Tencent also indicates that the ecological footprint is a source of constant reflection. Thus, combined with optimizing the performance of its servers, data centers based on this model should use green energy. The roof of the T-block data center is equipped with photovoltaic cells, which can provide 100% power in optimal weather conditions.