After [1]announcing the AMD EPYC 8005 "Sorano" series back in February, AMD recently began shipping these Zen 5 successors to the [2]EPYC 8004 "Siena" line-up. With [3]the EPYC 8005 product stack ranging from 8 to 84 cores and being drop-in upgrades for EPYC 8004 servers after a BIOS update, these are quite some interesting processors for those after a single socket, performant server. Up today are benchmarks of the EPYC 8635P as the flagship 84 core Sorano CPU.

[4]

The AMD EPYC 8635P "Sorano" is the top-end offering in the EPYC 8005 series with 84 cores / 168 threads, 1.6GHz base clock, 3.45GHz all-core boost speed, and a maximum boost clock of 4.5GHz. The EPYC 8635P has a 225 Watt TDP while can be configured as low as 155 Watts for those in energy/thermal constrained environments. There is a 384MB L3 cache with the EPYC 8635P. The 1KU pricing on the AMD EPYC 8635P comes in at $5,799 USD.

In comparison, the AMD EPYC 8534P as the top-end EPYC 8004 "Siena" model was 64 cores / 128 threads, 2.3GHz base clock, 3.1GHz all-core and maximum boost clock. The EPYC 8535P also has just 128MB of L3 cache and a 200 Watt TDP. With the EPYC 8635P at the top-end of Sorano is thus the 20 additional cores -- Zen 5 rather than Zen 4 -- along with 256MB of additional cache, +1.4GHz maximum boost clock, and +0.35GHz on the all-core boost speed all while having just a 25 Watt increase to the default TDP. Plus EPYC Sorano CPUs support up to six channel DDR5-6400 speeds compared to DDR5-4800 with Siena. 96 lanes of PCI Express 5.0 are supported across both Siena and Sorano.

[5]

Making the EPYC 8005 line-up all the more attractive on top of those beefed-up specs at the top-end is that Sorano is a drop-in replacement to existing EPYC 8004 Socket SP6 servers/motherboards. For my testing with the AMD reference server platform, indeed with a simple BIOS upgrade I was able to get the EPYC 8635P up and running. Of course, you'll want to upgrade your memory too for the optimal memory bandwidth unless you were already running faster than DDR5-4800 memory. In the case of the AMD reference server at least, only DDR5-5200 was supported after the BIOS upgrade for Sorano compatibility.

The AMD EPYC 8005 series is being promoted for low-power, small footprint server designs that are especially relevant for edge computing, telco, cloud storage, and similar deployments.

Thanks to a review sample from AMD, I've been trying out the EPYC 8635P processor and it's been delivering captivating performance and power efficiency gains as an upgrade over the still very capable EPYC 8004 processors. As I still haven't received any Intel Xeon 6700 "Granite Rapids" review samples from Intel, this article is just looking at the gen-on-gen performance going from the top-end Siena CPU of the EPYC 8534P to the top-end Sorano CPU of the new EPYC 8635P.

[6]

Testing of the AMD EPYC 8635P occurred on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with the Linux 7.0 kernel. Given the AMD Zen 5 support being quite mature already, there were no surprises or issues encountered in running AMD EPYC 8005 series on modern Linux distributions. Even older Linux distributions should still be fine considering the drop-in upgrade path with Sorano.

Also of benefit to power efficiency with EPYC Sorano is that with the AMD EPYC 8005 series there is now AMD P-State driver support on Linux, similar to the EPYC 9005 Turin series also using AMD P-State compared to ACPI CPUFreq with Zen 4 server CPUs and older.

Let's see what the uplift is going from the top-end EPYC 8004 Siena CPU to the new EPYC 8005 Sorano.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-EPYC-8005-Series

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/EPYC+8004

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-EPYC-8005-SKU-Table

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-epyc-8635p&image=amd_epyc_8635p_1_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-epyc-8635p&image=amd_epyc_8635p_2_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-epyc-8635p&image=amd_epyc_8635p_3_lrg