With today’s announcement of the AMD EPYC 4005P “Grado” entry-level server processors, up for review today are the EPYC 4565P and EPYC 4585PX processors as the top-end Zen 5 processors for budget server builds and basic bare metal server hosting. With the prior-generation EPYC 4004 series AMD was already leaving over Intel’s entry-level Xeon E processors that have become rather embarrassing for the company with its stagnate line-up of low-cost server processors. Now with the AMD EPYC 4005 series, AMD is in an even stronger position and providing a total knock-out to the new Xeon 6300P competition headlined by the Xeon 6369P flagship model.
Derived from the Ryzen 9000 series family line-up, the EPYC 4005 series brings Zen 5 to entry-level server, single socket AM5 motherboards. Most — if not all — AM5 server motherboards will see BIOS updates soon enabling support for the EPYC 4005P processors while continuing to allow ECC DDR5 memory, BMC support, and other features to enjoy out of these small business and hosted server platforms.
With the EPYC 4005P line-up there is up to 16 Zen 5 cores plus SMT for 32 threads, AVX-512 and other ISA features in common with the rest of the Zen 5(C) processors, the “PX” SKUs for 3D V-Cache. and DDR5-5600 ECC memory is compared to DDR5-5200 with the EPYC 4004 series.
Meanwhile the recently announced Intel Xeon 6300 series there was little change over the Xeon E-2400 processors. With the Xeon 6300 series there is only up to 8 cores / 16 threads, no AVX-512 support, and still relying on DDR5-4800 memory as the top speed. Intel’s top-end SKU is the Xeon 6369P with 8 cores, 3.3GHz base frequency, 5.3GHz all-core turbo frequency, and 5.7GHz maximum turbo frequency. The Intel Xeon 6369P has just a 24MB L3 cache and a 95 Watt TDP. Meanwhile with the AMD EPYC 4585PX is 16 cores / 32 threads, 4.3GHz base frequency, 5.7GHz maximum boost clock, 170 Watt TDP, and 128MB L3 cache. With the EPYC 4565P is the same clocks and core/thread counts but with a 64MB L3 cache, still much greater than what’s available with the Xeon 6369P flagship of the Xeon 6300 line-up. Another notable difference with the Xeon 6300 series only having 20 PCI Express lanes but 28 with EPYC 4004/4005 series. The Xeon 6369P 1KU list price is $606 USD while the EPYC 4565P is around $649 and the EPYC 4585PX around $699 USD.
For this launch day testing of the EPYC 4005 “Grado” series are benchmarks of the EPYC 4565P flagship as well as the EPYC 4585PX as the 3D V-Cache flagship variant. For comparison are the prior-generation EPYC 4564P and EPYC 4584PX equivalents. All of the EPYC 4004/4005 processors were tested within the same Supermicro AS-3015A-I H13SAE-MF server. With a simple BIOS upgrade this Supermicro platform could enjoy EPYC 4005 support. Kingston 9965794-022.A00G 2 x 32GB ECC DDR5 DIMMs were used for testing with native DDR5-5600 support on the EPYC 4005 series while dropping to DDR5-5200 for EPYC 4004.
For the Intel Xeon 6369P testing a Supermicro Super Server X13SCL-F was used with that top-end 8-core Xeon 6300 series SKU and 2 x 32GB DDR5 ECC memory limited to DDR5-4800 speeds.
A 2TB SOLIDIGM SSDPFKNU020TZ NVMe SSD was used for storage on all of these entry-level servers tested. For providing a very up-to-date Linux software experience for both the EPYC 4005 and Xeon 6300 series, Ubuntu 25.04 was used while running the Linux 6.14 kernel and GCC 14.2 compiler. The performance governor was used during all of these benchmarks. Thanks to AMD for providing the EPYC 4005 review samples for launch-day testing at Phoronix.
