AMD EPYC vs Intel Xeon

It’s an interesting one – AMD hasn’t had the best reputation the past 10 years for it’s CPUs.

The latest iteration of the AMD server CPU, named EPYC was released on June 2017 to worldwide acclaim and scepticism.

Previously for the past 10 years AMD has produced the AMD Opteron CPU. A fairly affordable, but poor CPU. The CPUs ran very hot and required massive amounts of cooling – Where there is heat there is power usage – So the AMD Opteron series CPUs were terribly power hungry, making it a non-starter for a lot of applications – Generally servers need to be as power efficient as possible.

In addition to the power issues was availability. European and UK supply of AMD Opteron CPUs was poor – Very few distributors had their products in stock and almost always were on long lead-times.

It seems AMD has listened and sorted themselves out. AMD EPYC CPUs run very cool, have an industry leading range of core count CPUs and when compared to an Intel CPU, core for core, the EPYC CPUs can be up to quarter of the price.

So the question is – Should I buy one? Yes and No, of course. AMD EPYC CPUs are high-end – the lowest model core count is 8 and equivalent of this would be an Intel E5-2620V4. Pricing at this range is very similar to Intel, but with the motherboards costing more than Intel equivalents, and only a few vendors producing them (Supermicro and Asus being the main ones) it’s still a niche market.

AMD EPYC is for HPC. At the higher core counts, as mentioned earlier, the 32 core CPU is around a quarter of the price of the Intel equivalent. For HPC this makes the Intel CPUs a very attractive option.

Server Case UK are premium Supermicro and Asus partners, producing servers daily for many markets and whilst we still favour Intel platforms, we are more than happy to explore AMD EPYC solutions for our customers.



If you’re considering an AMD EPYC based system and would like to talk to us about the viability or as a proof of concept for a larger installation please give us a call on 01283 576847 or drop us an email to sales@serverstore.com