Server level chips enter the embedded market, AMD's processor drives the AI flood

The AMD EPYC Embedded 9005 series CPU has been optimized for the embedded market, achieving a balance between computing power and specially designed embedded features, enhancing product lifespan, system resilience, and the convenience of embedded application development.
This processor adopts the mature Zen 5 architecture, providing leading performance and energy efficiency, enabling network, storage, and industrial edge systems to process more data faster and more efficiently.
Artificial intelligence workload driven, embedded computing upgrade
Why AMD launched the EPYC Embedded 9005 series CPU for the embedded market is mainly due to three trends in future embedded computing.
Tarang Shah, Senior Product Manager for AMD Embedded x86 Product Management, explained that due to the drivers of artificial intelligence, workloads, and applications, network traffic has significantly increased, which has also greatly increased the demand for data processing. Some research institutions predict that in the next five years, network traffic will increase by 120% due to the drive of artificial intelligence workloads, which requires high-throughput, low latency, and highly energy-efficient data processing and transmission technologies.
At the same time, the growth of traffic has also driven the demand for data storage, which has increased by 20% in five years, and this trend will continue. Data storage is not only about expanding the scale, but also requires optimizing the access methods of data storage, so that the data storage system can perform real-time data analysis and calculation. Therefore, higher requirements are put forward for I/O connectivity, computing power, etc.
In addition, the demand for computing at the industrial edge is exploding. In industrial environments, real-time data processing is necessary. For example, many sensors and edge devices need to process massive amounts of data locally to support real-time decision-making, which puts higher demands on computing performance and energy consumption.
Three major features of AMD EPYC Embedded 9005
The embedded functions supported by AMD EPYC Embedded 9005 series CPUs are mainly divided into three categories: extended lifespan, system resilience and security, and application development simplicity.
Among them, it supports extending the product lifecycle to seven years, which can avoid the need for repeated design and better protect customers' investments. At the same time, maintaining the reliability and durability of the product enables it to have more reliable operational performance throughout its extended lifecycle.
Embedded applications require higher system availability and data storage, therefore, AMD EPYC Embedded 9005 series CPUs have added many features, including NTB (non transparent bridging) DRAM Flush、 Dual SPI (Dual Serial Peripheral Interface), etc. The NTB function can improve the availability of the system, with higher redundancy to ensure fault tolerance and multi group configuration of the system. In addition, DRAM Flush can retain data even when power is turned off. There is also dual SPI, which allows customers to securely boot and load programs, verifying the platform during this process to ensure that the execution environment is trustworthy and secure.
It also has a very simplified application software development process, such as supporting the Yocto framework and DPDK/SPDK, which are data plane development kits and storage performance development kits. There are also quarterly releases with a wide scope of validation, accelerating the time to market for applications. Yocto, DPDK/SPDK and other software support are unique to this processor.
The Yocto framework is a widely used framework that enables customers to customize Linux configurations to better meet their software application needs. DPDK/SPDK can greatly improve system performance, and data processing can be done in user space instead of kernel space.
Significant advantages in computing power and energy efficiency
The AMD EPYC Embedded 9005 series processors are designed to support computationally intensive embedded systems with single slot 8 to 192 cores. Its industry-leading core density provides up to 1.3 times and 1.6 times data processing throughput improvements for network and storage workloads, respectively, making it highly suitable for network and security firewall platforms, storage systems, and industrial control applications.
For example, in terms of firewalls, as network traffic continues to increase, higher throughput allows processors to process larger data packets in real time without slowing down the speed of traffic. In addition, the storage controller can also shorten the read and write time required to write to the storage memory in higher throughput environments.
The adoption of the new Zen 5c core architecture can provide higher throughput and better energy efficiency. Compared with competitors, the single slot throughput is expected to increase by 1.3 times, and the performance/power ratio is expected to increase by 1.3 times.
In terms of I/O connectivity, each slot has up to 6TB of DDR5 memory capacity and expanded I/O connectivity, supporting up to 160 PCIe Gen5 channels and CXL 2.0, enabling storage capacity expansion and high-speed data transfer for network and storage applications.
In addition, the processor can work collaboratively with GPUs and FPGAs. For example, in terms of large language model processing, the AMD EPYC embedded 9005 combined with the GPU can be a host processor, and the CPU passes data to the AMD GPU for inference of large language models. AMD's FPGA can assist in logic control when the EPYC embedded 9005 is in a low-power state.
It can be seen that the AMD EPYC Embedded 9005 series not only has excellent computing power of server level chips, but also meets the requirements of long lifespan, system resilience, security, and other aspects in embedded applications. It is reported that AMD Epyc Embedded 9005 series processors are currently providing samples to early customers and are expected to begin mass production and shipment in the second quarter of 2025.