AMD is Ryzen to the SMB occasion with a bundle of baby Epycs • The Register

AMD on Tuesday revealed its latest chips to get a Zen 5 refresh with the launch of its itty bitty Epyc 4005-series CPUs.

The House of Zen is betting on the parts it thinks will help it win over small-to-midsize businesses, branch offices, and dedicated hosting providers that don’t necessarily need or want to pay for all the cores, memory, PCIe lanes, or dual-socket support that its datacenter chips have traditionally offered.

“We knew that we were not serving the SMB and dedicated hoster space very well, and we needed to,” Dennis McQueen, the product marketing manager for AMD Server solutions group, said in a press briefing ahead of the launch. “We just had to repackage right size and appropriately price a product line that fit into those spaces.”

AMD’s first batch products to attempt this were its 4004-series Epycs announced last year. And, much like those parts, this year’s batch of baby Epycs are essentially just rebadged Ryzen 9000-series desktop chips. Under the hood, you’ll find the same complement of core complex (CCD) and I/O dies that boast support for up to 16 cores, 32 threads, and 192GBs of DDR5. Heck, they even share the same AM5 socket as their consumer counterparts.

Here’s a high-level overview of AMD’s latest generation of baby Epycs, the 4005-series – click to enlarge

Here’s a quick run down of the Epyc 4005 SKUs launching today:

But while the brand on the heat spreader may be all that’s different physically, AMD told us the chips have been subjected to more rigorous testing and validation to prepare them for 24/7 service.

“It’s the same chip, same package, etc, but it is validated for server OSs, and we offer software RAID support… and then we do do additional life cycle testing,” Greg Gibby, senior product marketing manager for AMD’s datacenter division, said.

Faster and cheaper than Chipzilla?

AMD’s latest Zen architecture, which we looked at in depth last year, offers several notable improvements that may be of interest to those running enterprise workloads.

In addition to a 16 percent uplift in instruction per clock (IPC), the chip’s AVX-512 vector extensions have been reworked for this generation. AMD’s Zen 5 cores now feature a 512-bit data path, which offers substantially higher performance than the double-pumped 256-bit approach we got back in Zen 4. With that said, your workload needs to take advantage of these fat vector extensions to benefit, and many still don’t. Viable use cases might be light machine learning – like OCR or image recognition as opposed to generative AI – or vector database, that type of thing.

Compared to Intel’s entry-level Xeon E-2400 and 6300P platforms, AMD’s baby Epycs appear much better equipped, boasting twice as many cores, higher base clocks, a larger L3 cache, more PCIe lanes and support for more and faster memory.

Here’s how AMD’s Epyc 4005 series compares to Intel’s Xeon E-2400 and 6300P-series chips – click to enlarge

Core-for-core, AMD claims its 8-core Epyc 4345P manages a 1.38x lead over Chipzilla’s similarly equipped Xeon 6369P in the Phoronix Test Suite. Pitted against AMD’s top-specced Epyc 4565P, the chip’s higher core count gives it a 1.83x advantage.

In terms of performance AMD claims its 4005-series parts are anywhere from 16 to 83 percent faster than Intel’s equivalent 6300P Xeons – click to enlarge

As with any vendor-supplied benchmarks, we recommend taking these claims with a grain of salt.

Not without compromises

While building server platforms on consumer CPUs may offer advantages in terms of power, thermals, and even per-core licensing agreements, it does mean compromising on I/O and memory intensive applications.

Although AMD’s Ryzen and Epyc platforms largely share the same compute dies, the I/O die on the consumer platform has been cut down considerably.

For instance, AMD’s Epyc Turin platform from late last year supports up to 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and 12 channels of DDR5 6400 MT/s, while its Baby Epycs are limited to 28 lanes and 2 channels of DDR5 5600 MT/s. The platform does support ECC memory but only when using unbuffered DIMMS. If you were hoping for registered ECC memory support, you’ll need to jump up to one of AMD’s higher performance Epyc platforms.

So while you might only need 16 cores, you may find that AMD’s Epyc 4005-series lacks the bandwidth or connectivity for something like an NVMe storage server.

Gibby notes that additional PCIe connectivity can be had through the motherboard chipset. However, we’ll note this typically requires stepping down from PCIe 5.0 to 4.0 speeds.

AMD’s Epyc 4005-series processors are available starting today, and several infrastructure-as-a-service providers, including OVHcloud and Vultr, are planning to offer instances or dedicated hosting based on the chips. ®