AMD EPYC
Hacker ApprovedThe most recommended of 8 server CPUs
People recommend EPYC server processors for strong multi-core performance, high memory bandwidth and good value. Critics say single-thread speed is weak and power use is high.
People recommend EPYC server processors for strong multi-core performance, high memory bandwidth and good value. Critics say single-thread speed is weak and power use is high.
29 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 26
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 90%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 26 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 8.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong multi-core performance
“Epyc "reigns supreme" for anyone caring about performance / total FPS throughput”
Comment from 20 Mar 2026 in “Video Encoding and Decoding with Vulkan Compute Shaders in FFmpeg” “Many numeric parameters leave no doubt about the increase in performance.”
Comment from 24 Jul 2026 in “AMD EPYC 9006 Venice Announced and Looks Poised to Be a Grand Slam” “the speed of latest amd epycs are miles ahead of the default ci instances”
Comment from 11 Apr 2026 in “Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI shut down Circus CI on Monday, June 1, 2026” - Comment from 23 Sep 2026 in “How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?”
Good value for the money
“you can build a micro-ATX machine with a Xeon or an EPYC in it for what feels like a pretty reasonable price”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business” “something like $85 for a current-gen AMD EPYC, which are also about 2x as fast”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users” “a used Epyc + DDR4 server can be great fun and epic value”
Comment from 25 Aug 2026 in “Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra” High memory bandwidth
“If I did it again, I'd build an EPYC machine with 12 channels of DDR5”
Comment from 6 Nov 2025 in “Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model” “you need real cores + high clock frequency + high memory bandwidth”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon” “Massive leap in bandwidth on these things.”
Comment from 24 Jul 2026 in “AMD EPYC 9006 Venice Announced and Looks Poised to Be a Grand Slam” Top choice for serious builds
“Save your money for a Xeon or EPYC build”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit” “you would need Threadripper or EPYC”
Comment from 22 May 2026 in “Was my $48K GPU server worth it?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Weak single-thread performance
“Power usage is not the best and singlethread is awful (-50%)”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “Cloud VM benchmarks 2026: performance/price for 44 VM types over 7 providers” “The Epyc CPU cores are _slow_ per core”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “Caliper: Right-size your CI runners”
Other server CPUs people recommend
The four most recommended other server CPUs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD EPYCThis page | 26 | 3 | 90% | 11 | — | Approved |
| AWS Graviton | 16 | 7 | 70% | 6 | — | Approved |
| Intel Xeon | 14 | 11 | 56% | 4 | 15 yrs3 owners | — |
| Nvidia Vera CPU | 11 | 7 | 61% | 6 | — | — |
| Ampere CPU | 8 | 6 | 57% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
31 of the 32 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“AMD still beats Apple with ease at multi-processing.”
“Threadripper or EPIC if it must be AMD camp”
“approximately nobody who can afford one is doing LLM inference on them”
“a used Epyc + DDR4 server can be great fun and epic value”
“AMDs marketing is just as sketchy. Their new Zen6 server page claims 3.3x performance per watt over vera”
“Massive leap in bandwidth on these things.”
“And pricing is reasonable, $14K for 256 CPU Core on leading edge 2nm GAA.”
“Many numeric parameters leave no doubt about the increase in performance.”
“AMD Epyc is a great chip line, and is one of the best enterprise processor product lines one can buy.”
“Save your money for a Xeon or EPYC build”
“you would need Threadripper or EPYC”
“Epyc hardware with Noctuas in a bigger case. I've got one at home. Runs my blog and a bunch of other things.”
“the speed of latest amd epycs are miles ahead of the default ci instances”
“the next price point that makes sense is a highly clocked Epyc for like 10k€”
“They're roughly 3x a 9950X die for these kinds of workloads.”
“Epyc's naming is beautiful and consistent”
“each core is significantly faster than Neoverse V3”
“Epyc "reigns supreme" for anyone caring about performance / total FPS throughput”
“e.g. Zen 5 Ryzen or Epyc CPUs and Granite Rapids Xeons”
“Power usage is not the best and singlethread is awful (-50%)”
“you need real cores + high clock frequency + high memory bandwidth”
“the performance per dollar would be abysmally low”
“The old chips are practically deadweight.”
“something like $85 for a current-gen AMD EPYC, which are also about 2x as fast”
“The Epyc CPU cores are _slow_ per core”
“For this sort of thing, I have leaned towards AMD Epyc, Intel e810, and DPDK”
“they don't scale. because each core doesn't really get that much cache or memory bandwidth”
“32 cores on a die, 256 on a package. Still stunning though”
“That's 8 times less than you'd get from an EPYC”
“you can build a micro-ATX machine with a Xeon or an EPYC in it for what feels like a pretty reasonable price”
“If I did it again, I'd build an EPYC machine with 12 channels of DDR5”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.