AMD EPYC 3000 Series Snowy Owl SoC spotted, Takes on Intel Xeon D

New details regarding AMD’s upcoming “Snowy Owl” platform have surfaced, which include the first EPYC 3000 Series processor, specifically called the EPYC 3251. The processor will be an embedded SoC form factor with the SP4r2 BGA Socket. The EPYC 3000 Series Snowy Owl lineup will strengthen the company’s position in the x86 market.

AMD Snowy Owl succeeds the full blown Naples platform that scales up to 32 cores. Snowy Owl, however, scales up to 16 cores only and will be available in two different packages. First, the Multi-Chip Module (MCM) will scale up to a maximum of 16 cores and 32 threads while the Single-Chip Module (SCM) variant will scale up to a max 8 cores and 16 threads.

READ ALSO: Ryzen Balanced plan behind Performance Gains on Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

The Snowy Owl platform is going to use the EPYC 3000 series nomenclature. The product spotted recently is the EPYC 3251 SoC, though it’s not clear which particular variant it refers to.

AMD generally uses EPYC XX51 branding to represent lesser variants so this particular 3251 SoC could be an SCM package. The more powerful MCM variants are slated to release first and will likely be represented by XX01 branding.

The Snowy Owl will compete against Intel Xeon D series. The AMD platform will have a few advantages over Xeon D: the flagship SKU will feature up to 32 MB of L3 cache, 4 memory channels, 64 PCIe lanes and support for USB 3.1. The TDP is ranging from 35W to 100W. For comparison, Xeon D has up to 24 MB L3, dual channel memory, up to 32 PCIe lanes and USB 3.0 support.

The EPYC 3000 Snowy Owl platform will be succeeded by the Starship in 2018-2019. The second generation EPYC is rumored to feature a staggering 64 cores and 128 threads. Not only this, but the L3 cache also gets a significant upgrade. You can read more about the next-gen EPYC here.