The most powerful AMD processor to date, the EPYC 9965, is offered on EBAY and other retailers online, at the time of writing, with discounts of up to 47%.
Compared to other similar instances that I traced before, the big difference is that there are much more EPYC 9965 for sale in the US. That before and all CPUs are new.
Run in October 2024, EPYC 9965 is AMD’s most expensive CPU with a suggested retail price of $ 14,813 and its most powerful with 192 Zen 5c and 384 threads nuclei. A search on eBay for 100-000000976, the OEM SKU Code (Actions Maintenance Unit) for 9965, raises 10 results, all of them based in the USA. UU. And new.
This is the first of several data -based items that I have compiled on CPU 41 AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 (Sockeded, Oem). In the rest of the series, I will analyze the cost per nucleus, core performance, CPU AMD that are becoming more expensive, all this with the new Ryzen CPU 9900/9950 x3d in the backdrop.
Some sellers offered 9965 for only $ 8,250 when buying a couple; The individual price began from $ 8,369. Finally, seek Epyc 9965 brought several entries from continental China. Calculate at 100 the total number of EPYC 9965 currently for sale on EBAY.
In Open Web, Wiredzone, a popular online retailer based in the US. It has been at this price for more than three months. Around a dozen other retailers around the world sell the AMD flagship servers processor for less than $ 11,000, a clear sign that the supply is relatively abundant.
Epyc 9965 requires a special motherboard if you plan to run a couple of them (because, why not). Experimenting 768 threads in a motherboard, such as the Gigabyte MZ73-LM2 with up to 24 DIMM slots is something that few of us will need, especially when said double speed plate is sold for around $ 2500 and requires a special housing. But if you want the best work station, that is a very good place to start.
So why such a fall?
The demand for this particular type of processor, one that focuses on hyperscalers such as Amazon Aws, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, has been one of the promoters of AMD’s success in the server market. The AMD market share increased almost zero more or less to approximately 25% in 2024.
So what to do with the myriad of suppliers who sell this processor of flagship and avant -garde servers for thousands of dollars less than the price of the label? Could the excess inventory be a reason why prices have dropped so fast in such a recent CPU?
But here is the thing, during my investigation, I was surprised to see that 9965 was not the only one to have such a large discount: 9655p (up to 47%), Epyc 9655 (up to 57%), etc., and so on all the great falls of experienced prices.
In fact, my instant survey of the CPUs of 5th generation of AMD (with a pinch of Threadripper), 41 CPU in total, reveals that most models have a 20% or more discount once they reach retail trade.
History that repeats itself
I started tracking this strange scenario two years ago when I noticed that American retailers sold the EPYC 9954 processor then three months with a massive discount of 30%. A month later, in March 2023, I discovered that hundreds of used CPU EPYC used were when Chinese hyperscalers rushed to improve their servers.
It seemed that someone in the supply chain tried to win a quick dollar in the ‘obsolete’ hardware with prices by lowering a little more than $ 1000 in June 2023. The same happened with the EPYC 9754 server processor of 128 cores that saw significant discounts, but nothing on the scale I am seeing today.
