Another EPYC: AMD launches Zen 4-based entry-level EPYC 4004 series

Since AMD re-emerged as a major competitor within the x86 CPU scene, one of AMD’s top priorities has been to win over customers in the highly lucrative and profitable server market. It’s a strategy that has paid off well for AMD, as while they are still the minority player in the space, they have continued to chip away at what was once Intel’s absolute control of the market, slowly bringing more and more customers to the market . EPYC ecosystem.

As the Zen 4 CPU architecture approaches its second anniversary, AMD is launching a final line of EPYC chips, targeting yet another Xeon market segment. This time it’s all about the entry-level 1P server market – small-scale, budget-conscious users who only need a handful of CPU cores – which AMD is capitalizing on with their new EPYC 4004 series processors.

Across AMD’s various product stacks, the new EPYC 4004 family essentially replaces Ryzen chips for use in servers. Ryzen for servers was never a dedicated product line within AMD, but it has nonetheless been a product segment within the company since 2019, with AMD targeting smaller-scale hosting providers who opted to use racks of consumer-scale hardware rather than going the high-end route. density to follow with high core count EPYC processors.

The upgrade to EPYC status repurposes that hardware ecosystem as a true suite with specialty chips and a handful of additional features that go with an EPYC chip. As a result, AMD is also expanding the scope of the market segments it targets by a hair, bringing in small business (SMB) users that AMD previously wasn’t pursuing. Regardless of the name in the market segment, the end result is that AMD is launching a budget-priced range of EPYC chips with 4 to 16 cores based on their consumer platforms.

The new EPYC 4004 series is based on AMD’s proven AM5 platform and Raphael processors, which we know better as the Ryzen 7000 series. Their new EPYC counterparts are an 8-chip stack made up almost entirely of rebranded Ryzen 7000 SKUs, all sharing the same core counts, clock speeds, and TDPs as their counterparts. The only exception to this is the cheapest chip of the bunch, the 4-core 4124P.

Because these are all based on AMD’s discrete consumer CPUs, the underlying architecture in all of these chips is Zen 4 throughout. So despite being positioned below the EPYC 8004 Siena series, you won’t find Zen 4c CPU cores here; everything is full fat Zen 4 CCDs. That means that while there are relatively few cores overall (for an EPYC processor), they are all high-performing cores, with nothing lower than 5.1 GHz.

Notably here, AMD is also mixing in some of their 3D V-Cache chip SKUs, which are denoted with the “PX” suffix. Both chips, based on the 7950X3D and 7900X3D respectively, have 1 CCD with V-Cache stacked on top, giving the chip a total of 128 MB of L3 cache. The remaining six SKUs all get the “P” suffix (indicating they are 1 socket processors) and come with TDPs ranging from 65 Watts to 170 Watts.

This does mean that the 4004 series is not particularly energy efficient according to EPYC server standards. This is a setup that is primarily intended to be cost-effective. Instead, power efficiency remains the domain of the EPYC 8004, with its modestly clocked, high-core Zen4c designs.

The reuse of Zen 4/AM5 means the EPYC 4004 series comes with all the features we’ve come to expect from the platform, including 28 lanes PCIe 5.0, 2 channels (128-bit) DDR5 memory with speeds up to DDR5-5200 and even integrated graphics card. Since this is a server component, ECC is officially supported on the chips – but note that, like the Ryzen Pro workstation chips, this is UDIMM only; registered DIMMs (RDIMMs) are not supported.

AMD isn’t disclosing which chipset will be paired with the EPYC 4004 processors, and while it will undoubtedly be AMD’s preferred ASMedia-designed I/O chipset, it’s interesting to note that this is at the motherboard level where the real server credentials of the new EPYC platform are located. are at. The EPYC 4004 platform differentiates itself from regular Ryzens and gains several additional business features, including support for baseboard management controllers (BMC), software RAID (RAIDXpert2 for Server), and support for official server operating systems. To be fair, this is still a fraction of the features found in a high-end enterprise solution like the EPYC 9004/8004 series, but it is some extra functionality befitting a platform intended to to be used in servers.

In turn, AMD’s new chips are designed to compete with Intel’s entry-level Xeon-E family. The This leaves the EPYC 4004 family somewhat uniquely positioned compared to the Xeon-E family, as Intel doesn’t have anything that is a true counterpart to AMD’s 12 and 16 core chips; After Xeon-E comes the much more capable (and expensive) Xeon-w family. So part of AMD’s strategy with the EPYC 4004 family is to serve a niche that Intel doesn’t serve.

(As an added bonus, AMD’s core counts also play well with Windows Server 2022 licenses. The Standard license covers up to 16 cores, so a top-of-the-line EPYC 4004 chip ensures server owners can max out their license, amortizing software costs. More cores )

As far as performance goes, Raptor Lake versus Zen 4 is largely settled by now. So I won’t spend too much time on AMD’s (many) benchmark slides. But suffice it to say that AMD, with a significant advantage in core count, can deliver an equally significant performance advantage in highly multi-threaded workloads (though it does come with a similar spike in power consumption in that scenario compared to the 95 Watt Intel chips).

In closing, AMD immediately launches the new EPYC 4004 product stack. Now that many of AMD’s regular server partners have already signed up – and the core hardware is immediately available – there won’t really be a ramp-up period.