On May 13, 2025, AMD officially released the EPYC4005 series of server processors specifically designed for small and medium-sized enterprises and managed IT service providers. It is based on the Zen 5 architecture, filling the gap of AMD in the entry-level server market. It aims to provide enterprise-level performance at a lower cost and help small and medium-sized enterprises break through resource limitations in the new round of AI-driven digital wave.
Product positioning and market strategy
The EPYC 4005 series is an upgraded product of AMD following the 4004 series launched in 2024. It continues the AM5 slot design, with core configurations ranging from 6 cores to 16 cores, forming a differentiated layout from the 192 cores of the high-end EPYC 9000 series. This strategy directly targets Intel's share in the small and medium-sized enterprise market, seizing low-end data centers and local deployment scenarios through cost-performance advantages. Derek Dicker, vice president of AMD's enterprise business, pointed out that this series addresses the core pain points of small and medium-sized enterprises in terms of budget, deployment complexity and IT manpower, and is particularly suitable for virtualization, e-commerce, content management systems (CMS) and AI-enhanced workloads.
Technological breakthroughs and performance advantages
Empowerment by Zen 5 Architecture: The EPYC 4005 series adopts the Zen 5 architecture with a 5nm process, supporting the AVX512 instruction set with a complete 512-bit data path. Its single-thread performance is 19% higher than that of Zen 4. Its level 3 cache can reach up to 128MB (including the 3D VCache model), the memory bandwidth has been increased to 192GB/s, and it supports dual-channel DDR55600 ECC UDIMM, with a speed increase of 7.7% compared to the previous generation DDR55200.
Scalability and energy efficiency balance: The entire series supports 28 PCIe 5.0 channels, allowing for the simultaneous connection of multiple NVMe SSDS or AI acceleration cards to meet high-throughput requirements. The thermal design power (TDP) can be flexibly configured from 65W to 170W. The flagship model EPYC 4585PX still maintains energy efficiency advantages at an acceleration frequency of 5.7GHz. Phoronix tests show that the 16-core EPYC 4565P outperforms the Intel Xeon 6300P by 1.83 times in a virtualized environment.
AI and Security Enhancements: Despite being positioned as entry-level, the EPYC 4005 still integrates the AMD Secure Processor, supporting memory Encryption (SME) and Trusted Execution Environment (SEV). Combined with the ROCm open-source ecosystem, lightweight AI inference tasks can be run, such as customer behavior analysis or video content review.
Application scenarios and partner ecosystem
From the perspective of scenario adaptation, traditional enterprise application mail servers (such as Exchange) and ERP/CRM systems can handle over 3,000 concurrent transactions per second with a 16-core configuration. The cloud hosting service optimizes bare metal instances through this processor, supporting elastic expansion of hundreds of virtual machines per hour and reducing latency to 0.3 milliseconds. The 3U MicroCloud multi-node server of edge computing Supermicro, equipped with EPYC 4005, is suitable for real-time inventory management and intelligent monitoring in the retail industry.
In terms of ecosystem support, AMD has collaborated with manufacturers such as Lenovo, Supermicro, and Gigabyte to launch customized solutions. For example, Lenovo's single-socket tower server is equipped with EPYC 4585PX, supporting 192GB of memory and dual GPU expansion, and its pricing is 25% lower than that of similar Xeon solutions. At the software level, both VMware vSphere and Proxmox have optimized virtualization support for this processor, and the virtual machine density has increased by 40%.
Market influence and competitive landscape
In the first quarter of 2025, AMD's revenue share in the x86 server market had reached 39.4%, with the EPYC series contributing the main growth driver. The launch of the 4005 series will further squeeze the market space of the Intel Xeon E2400 series, which is 18% more expensive with the same core configuration.
With the penetration of AI into small and medium-sized enterprises, EPYC 4005 can handle lightweight AI model inference through a high clock frequency (5.7GHz) and the AVX512 instruction set. For example, in locally deployed computer vision applications, the image recognition speed of the 16-core model has increased by 35% compared to the previous generation.
Despite the significant advantages of EPYC 4005, AMD still faces two major challenges:
Export control risk: The restrictions on semiconductor exports from the United States to China may affect the delivery of this series in the Asian market, with a potential loss of approximately 800 million US dollars in inventory.
2. Demand for deepening the ecosystem: Small and medium-sized enterprises rely more on out-of-the-box solutions and need to further simplify BIOS configuration and operation and maintenance toolchains.
In summary, AMD plans to roll out its 3D VCache technology to more models and introduce a low-power variant for edge computing. The release of the EPYC 4005 series has enabled AMD to reshape the industry rules by sinking data center-level technologies to small and medium-sized enterprises.
