Epyc for socket AM5 confirmed by second source. Will the legendary Opteron 144 come to life?

The idea of ​​server processors for PC sockets is roughly two decades old and targets the lower price segment. In the past, it also attracted interest from ordinary users, especially when AMD released the Opteron 1xx 19 years ago. From the lowest models, they had a large 1MB cache (in contrast to standard Athlons, which were equipped with it only in higher price ranges and 512 KB had to be enough for the basic models). In combination with a high potential for overclocking and an interesting price (the cheapest solution with 1MB cache), the Opteron 144 in particular became a hit.

The desktop socket for Xeons was also used by Intel, series Sandy Bridge in 2011 it was also released in the form of so-called Xeons E3-1xxx in two to four core versions.

Perhaps AMD will repeat something similar with the AM5 socket and architecture Zen 4. Last Wednesday, leaker Hoang Anh Phu announced that AMD is preparing the Epyc 4xx4 series based on the CPU Raphael (=Zen 4 for AM5), which will (obviously) be single-socket and support X3D variants (V-cache). However, some websites were quite reserved about this information.

AMD Epyc 4xx4 (zcyandrew @ChipHell)

Subsequently, however, user zcyandrew from the ChipHell discussion forum pointed out that these processors appeared on the auction portal Ebay, namely:

• Epic 4244P
• Epic 4344P
• Epic 4364P
• Epic 4384PX
• Epic 4484PX
• Epic 4564P
• Epyc 4584PX

The marking indicates that models ending with the letter X are equipped with V-cache. It can be expected that for processors intended for server use, the V-cache will be located on both processor chiplets (ie 64MB + 64MB will be added to the standard 32MB + 32MB L3 cache, which means 96MB + 96MB in total). However, it should be kept in mind that the V-cache on both chiplets will probably limit the clock frequency to around 4 GHz, so the advantage of the combination of high single-core performance + V-cache, as demonstrated by the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, will not apply to this series.

The source of these processors on Ebay was the seller pccompd, which is based in the USA and sells used components, mainly processors and mainly server products, Xeons, of various generations. It looks like she might be looking for a person who has ties to some server manufacturer and who is selling off parts from discarded machines. These Epycys could then be the final samples that AMD provided to that manufacturer for testing and tuning, and their sale could signal an imminent release (unless it is a specialty at the request of some AMD partner).