How AMD EPYC™ Server CPUs Help Telco Scale

Meeting the Demands of a Hyperconnected World

Telco operators are being pushed to deliver more capacity, lower latency, and higher reliability while power budgets, rack space, and environmental requirements tighten. Mobile data traffic is expected to double between 2023 and 2029, surpassing 400 exabytes per month by the end of the decade.¹ The challenge is simple: operators must expand capability without expanding footprint or energy use.

Key pressures include:

Power and space limitations in increasingly dense data centers

Rising energy costs and strict environmental requirements

Transition to 5G and cloud-native infrastructure

Escalating expectations around uptime, speed, and low-latency connectivity

Increasing security and privacy demands

To keep pace, operators need infrastructure that delivers high performance per watt, per rack, and per dollar. AMD EPYC™ server CPUs offer them exactly that.

The AMD EPYC Server CPU Advantage

With 500+ world records and the world’s highest performing x86 CPU, AMD EPYC server CPUs are primed to elevate the way customers operate. Purpose-built for the demands of modern telecoms infrastructure – balancing power, performance, and scalability across the core network, edge, and radio access network (RAN) – AMD EPYC server CPUs deliver high core density and leadership performance per watt, giving operators the ability to do more with the same energy and space budgets.

AMD EPYC server CPUs offer:

Up to 192 cores and 384 threads

Up to 12 channels of DDR5-6400 memory, up to 6TB per socket

Up to 128 PCIe® Gen 5 lanes in single socket and up to 160 in 2P platforms

TDP options scaling from 155W up to 500W

With these capabilities, it’s possible for operators to consolidate their server footprint by up to 88% while achieving similar or better throughput, reducing power usage by as much as 70%, and improving overall TCO by up to 71% when compared to legacy platforms.²

AMD EPYC server CPUs already power 5G cores, fixed wireless access (FWA) deployments, network automation, and AI-driven analytics, helping telcos deliver more while consuming less. With a 2030 goal to deliver a 20x increase in rack-scale energy efficiency from a 2024 base year, AMD aims to enable a typical AI model that today requires more than 275 racks to be trained in under one rack by 2030, using 95% less electricity.³

Connecting Each Layer of the Telco Network

From the core to the network edge, AMD EPYC server CPUs scale effortlessly across the entire network.

Core network: Ericsson 5G Core and Cloud Native Infrastructure (CNIS) solutions on AMD EPYC server CPUs achieved up to 40% better power efficiency than prior systems. This helps to reduce operating costs and promote more sustainable growth.

Edge: AMD EPYC server CPU’s high core counts make them ideal for low-latency workloads like fixed wireless access (FWA), IoT, and AI inferencing. For example, in a Tier 1 operator’s FWA deployment, they can provide over 3,000 threads per rack while consuming less than 10kw, versus 17kw for competitor equivalents at the same density.⁴

RAN: Connecting end users to the mobile network is where AMD EPYC server CPUs’ parallelism, memory bandwidth, and power efficiency enable virtualized and cloud-based RAN implementations. Through virtualized solutions, AMD helps to provide operators with freedom of choice in their hardware infrastructure and enables an open, flexible, and scalable approach to developing their network.

Enabling Network Security with AMD Infinity Guard

Security is fundamental to telco operations. AMD Infinity Guard⁵ provides a robust suite of hardware-level protection layers, helping to defend against internal and external interference and keep network data safe. Combining hardware-based encryption, virtualization isolation, and firmware protection, features such as Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Secure Memory Encryption (SME) help safeguard workloads and protect data even if a system is physically compromised, while Secure Boot verifies only trusted firmware runs at startup.

With 5^th Gen AMD EPYC server CPUs, these defenses extend even further with the introduction of Trusted I/O . This extends the boundaries of data security to external trusted devices like GPUs and accelerators, ideal in the era of AI where data moves across boundaries into GPUs for inference and/or training.

Elevating the Future of Telco with AMD

Telcos are under pressure to deliver more capacity, better service, and greater efficiency, and all at a lower cost. AMD EPYC server CPUs deliver the performance, power savings, and security capabilities to help them do it. Reach out to your AMD representative or  visit amd.com to learn more about how you can support your telco customers’ modernization efforts.