AMD and Micron: Extreme workload performance with 5th Gen PCIe^® and 5th Gen EPYC Processors

AMD and Micron are two powerhouses in their respective industries, with a long history of multifaceted collaboration. We collaborate across various Micron technologies (such as memory and SSDs) and AMD solutions (including CPUs and GPUs) for both the data center and client market segments.

In a recent collaboration on the memory side, we demonstrated the powerful combination of Micron DDR5 memory and AMD EPYC™ processors for AI and database infrastructures. And on the data center SSD side, AMD recently supported the launch of the Micron 9550 PCIe Gen5 SSD, one of the top-performing NVMe SSDs in the market. This SSD is particularly well-suited for AI and HPC use cases, but it’s also a great solution for more mainstream business-critical enterprise applications — such as databases supporting business intelligence/decision support systems (BI/DSS) workloads — as we discuss in this blog The Micron 9550 has been qualified by AMD for use with its 4^th and 5^th Gen EPYC processors.

Top-end AMD CPUs stand out due to their exceptionally high number of PCIe lanes, with single-socket configurations based on the 5^th Gen EPYC processor offering up to 128 PCIe Gen5 lanes. This makes them particularly interesting for server configurations in which storage performance is key, as our data center NVMe SSDs rely on PCIe lanes to connect to the CPU. The high number of PCIe lanes in AMD CPUs enables data center architects to design dense, performant storage solutions — which is something they care about a lot.

For these reasons, our SSD Data Center Workload Engineering team has developed a strong collaboration with their AMD peers over the years, aimed at testing and tuning our solutions for various data-centric workloads.

We’ve collaborated closely with AMD on numerous workload tests, as illustrated in another blog post that highlights the collaboration between Micron, AMD, WEKA, and Supermicro. In our most recent collaboration with AMD’s solutions engineering team, we benchmarked our latest Micron 9550 (PCIe Gen5) against an older Micron PCIe Gen4 SSD (the Micron 7450 mentioned earlier) for a business-critical enterprise application using AMD 5^th Gen EPYC processors. We focused on the PostgreSQL database for a BI/DSS workload. Databases and analytics are among the application spaces our joint server OEM customers are most interested in.

In this AMD workload study, our PCIe Gen5 SSD showed 1.45x the database queries per hour (QphH) of the PCIe Gen4 SSD when tested using SF1000. SF1000, in the context of the TPC-H benchmark used by AMD for this workload analysis, corresponds to a scale factor of 1000 and - typicallyrepresents approximately a 1 TB dataset. The same test revealed a performance improvement of 1.33x the database queries per hour for the Gen5 SSD (QphH) when tested using SF300 (approximately a 300GB dataset).

These performance uplifts show that the PCIe Gen5 SSD is an excellent choice where the highest BI/DSS QphH is a deciding factor. At the same time, the PCIe Gen4 SSD remains an excellent solution for tasks that require mainstream QphH performance from their relational database management system (RDBMS) platform.

For more detailed information, access the full performance brief on the Micron website.

Why does our collaboration in workload testing matter? Micron and AMD rigorously test Micron’s solutions with AMD EPYC processors to ensure optimal performance and reliability under real-world conditions. OEMs benefit from thoroughly vetted components that reduce deployment risks and enhance customer satisfaction. Data center enterprises receive solutions optimized for their demanding environments, improving data processing and system responsiveness. The goal of this collaboration is to make AMD and Micron truly “better together.” Doing so ensures technology that meets current and future demands by leveraging advancements in SSD and processor technology.