Meet AMD’s new 192-core CPU monster; the EPYC 9965 is its most expensive processor ever at nearly $15,000

(Image credit: AMD)

AMD has announced a slew of new server processors under the EPYC banner.

Already pre-announced at an event in June 2024, the 5th generation Turin products fall under the 9005 series moniker and range from an 8-core model all the way to a 192-core one.

At just under $15,000, the EPYC 9965 uses the Zen 5c core architecture has 192 cores and 384 threads and will compete against Intel Granite Rapids Xeon 6 range as well as Ampere’s AmpereOne server CPUs. It has a base CPU speed of 2.25GHz with a TDP of 500W (AMD’s highest ever) and 384MB L3 cache.

Threadripper on the horizon

Elsewhere the 64-core EPYC 9575F caught my attention; it is a high frequency processor with a base CPU speed of 3.3GHz and a boost of up to 5GHz, its highest yet and a good blueprint for the probable Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9000WX series coming in 2025. It is also positioned as a purpose-built AI host node CPU to play nice with H100/H200 GPU from archrival Nvidia.

Compared to the previous 4th generation Genoa platform, AMD says Turin offers a 17% IPC improvement, with support for 12 DDR5-6400 and 128 PCIe 5.0 channels. Note that official CXL 2.0 support joins the spec sheet for EPYC for the first time ever.

AMD’s top Zen 5 part remains at 128 cores; compared to the 9754, the 9755 has a higher base clock (2.7GHz vs 2.25GHz), a much higher TDP (39% higher) and twice the cache at 512MB. It is also slightly more expensive, but that’s a reasonable trade-off given the enormous improvements elsewhere.

Perhaps a sign of things to come, 10 CPUs launched in 2024 so far have had a TDP of 400W or above; last year, that number was one. This emphasizes the fact that both power consumption and power dissipation are going up significantly; a 25% increase in top TDP (or 100W in absolute numbers) may be small, but data centers and hyperscalers often operate thousands of CPUs.

Intel’s TDP are also maxed out at 500W for Xeon P models but its efficient Xeon models have a much lower TDP compared to AMD’s Zen 5c: The 144 core/thread 6766E tops 250W or 1.74W per core compared to 2.6W for the 9965 but that’s where Siena (and its SP6 socket) comes in.

AMD also released more details about its forthcoming MI325X accelerator and its successor, the MI355X.

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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.