Since AMD has once again become a major competitor in the x86 CPU scene, one of AMD’s top priorities has been to win customers in the extremely lucrative and profitable server market. This strategy has paid off for AMD because, although the company is still the minority player in this space, it has continued to chip away at Intel’s once absolute control of the market and gradually attract more and more customers to the EPYC ecosystem.
Now, as the Zen 4 CPU architecture celebrates its second birthday, AMD is releasing a final batch of EPYC chips, targeting another Xeon market segment. This time it’s all about the entry-level 1P server market – small, budget-conscious users who only need a handful of CPU cores – which AMD is targeting with its new EPYC 4004 series processors.
Within 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 from AMD, yet it has been a product segment within the company since 2019, with AMD targeting smaller hosting providers that have instead opted to use racks of consumer-scale hardware rather than the high-end Density route to choose with EPYC processors with high core count.
With the upgrade to EPYC status, this hardware ecosystem is re-deployed as a proper product line with dedicated chips and a handful of additional features that fit an EPYC chip. As a result, AMD is also broadening the scope of the market segments it targets to include small businesses (SMEs) that AMD has not previously pursued. Regardless of the name of the market segment, the bottom line is that AMD is releasing a low-cost series of 4- to 16-core EPYC chips based on its 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 with the same core counts, clock speeds and TDPs as their counterparts. The only exception here is the cheapest chip in the series, the 4124P with four cores.
| AMD EPYC 4004 processors | ||||||||||
| AnandTech | Core/ thread |
base Freq |
1T Freq |
L3 Cache |
PCIe | Memory | TDP (W) |
Price (1KU) |
Ryzen version | |
| 4584PX | 16 | 32 | 4200 | 5700 | 128MB (3D) | 28×5.0 | 2 x DDR5-5200 UDIMM | 120 | $699 | 7950X3D |
| 4484PX | 12 | 24 | 4400 | 5600 | 128MB (3D) | 120 | $599 | 7900X3D | ||
| 4564P | 16 | 32 | 4500 | 5700 | 64MB | 170 | $699 | 7950X | ||
| 4464P | 12 | 24 | 3700 | 5400 | 64MB | 65 | $429 | 7900 | ||
| 4364P | 8th | 16 | 4500 | 5400 | 32MB | 105 | $399 | 7700X | ||
| 4344P | 8th | 16 | 3800 | 5300 | 32MB | 65 | $329 | 7700 | ||
| 4244P | 6 | 12 | 3800 | 5100 | 32MB | 65 | $229 | 7600 | ||
| 4124P | 4 | 8th | 3800 | 5100 | 16MB | 65 | $149 | New | ||
Since these are all based on AMD’s discrete consumer CPUs, the underlying architecture of all of these chips is Zen 4 throughout. So despite being positioned below the EPYC 8004 Siena series, you won’t find any Zen 4c CPU cores here; Everything is full fat Zen 4 CCDs. This means that while there are relatively few cores overall (for an EPYC processor), they are all high-performance cores with no turbo running at less than 5.1 GHz.
Notably, AMD is also mixing in some of its 3D V-cache chip SKUs, which are marked with the “PX” suffix. Based on the 7950X3D and 7900X3D respectively, both chips feature 1 CCD with V-cache stacked on top, giving the chip a total of 128MB of L3 cache. The remaining 6 SKUs all carry the “P” suffix – indicating that they are 1-socket processors – and have TDPs ranging from 65 watts to 170 watts.
However, this means that the 4004 series is not particularly power efficient by 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 design.
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 of PCIe 5.0, 2 channels (128-bit) of DDR5 memory with speeds up to DDR5 5200 and even integrated graphics. Since this is a server part, 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 is not disclosing the chipset that will be paired with the EPYC 4004 processors, and while it will undoubtedly be AMD’s most popular I/O chipset developed by ASMedia, it is interesting to note that the actual server credentials of the new EPYC Platform at the motherboard level are included. The EPYC 4004 platform differs from traditional Ryzens and gains several additional enterprise features, including support for Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), software RAID (RAIDXpert2 for servers), and official support for server operating systems. Certainly this is still a fraction of the features found in a high-end enterprise solution like the EPYC 9004/8004 series, but they are some additional features befitting a platform designed for use in servers is intended.
AMD’s new chips, in turn, are intended to compete against Intel’s entry-level Xeon-E family. The Xeon-E family is itself a redress of consumer hardware (Raptor Lake) and is a pure P-core chip line, with Intel offering SKUs with 4, 6, or 8 CPU cores. This makes the EPYC 4004 family somewhat uniquely positioned compared to the Xeon-E family, as Intel has nothing that is a true counterpart to AMD’s 12- and 16-core chips; after Xeon-E comes the far more powerful (and more 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 a side benefit, AMD’s core numbers also mesh well with Windows Server 2022 licensing. The standard license covers up to 16 cores, allowing server owners with a top-of-the-line EPYC 4004 chip to maximize their license, thereby amortizing the software cost.) more cores)
In terms of performance, Raptor Lake is now largely decided compared to Zen 4. So I won’t spend too much time on AMD’s (many) benchmark slides. But suffice it to say that with a significant advantage in core count, AMD can provide an equally significant performance advantage in heavily multithreaded workloads (although in this scenario there will be a similar increase in power consumption compared to the 95-watt Intel chips comes).
Finally, AMD is now launching the new EPYC 4004 product stack. Since many of AMD’s regular server partners are already signed up and the core hardware is available immediately, there will be no significant ramp-up period.
