Performance & Power Of The Low-Cost EPYC 4005 "Grado" vs. Original EPYC 7601 Zen 1 Flagship CPU
👁 AMD EPYC 8 year CPU comparison
In total I ran more than 200 benchmarks looking at how the AMD EPYC 4585PX performance compared to the original EPYC 7601 server with this fresh benchmarking on Ubuntu 25.04 Linux.
Across the wide span of server, HPC, code compilation, video encoding/transcoding, scripting, and a variety of other workloads, the EPYC 4585PX processor was at 2.69x the performance of the original EPYC 7601 processor. That 2.69x performance is even with the EPYC 4585PX processor being in the budget/affordable server CPU line-up and not the flagship EPYC 9005 series. Benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 7601 against the EPYC 9005 series will come in a follow-up article, but long story short there the performance difference is even more jaw-dropping. The results today show how far the AMD EPYC server performance has come in the past eight years that a budget server today based on the EPYC 4005 "Grado" series can deliver far better performance than a larger EPYC 7601 server processor with twice the core/thread count and that boasted eight channel memory.
When looking at the CPU power consumption it came out to be fairly similar. Across all workloads tested the EPYC 4585PX had a 153 Watt average to the EPYC 7601 at 141 Watts and the peak was also close at 204 vs. 195 Watts.
The AMD EPYC 4585PX based on a modern Supermicro server platform and with just two DDR5 DIMMs did provide for total power savings compared to the Tyan EPYC Naples server platform. On average across all workloads the total wall power was 225 Watts for the Grado server and 238 Watts on the aging Naples server. The peak wall power consumption was also much better with the modern budget server at 319 versus 382 Watts. The minimum/idle power consumption out of the AMD EPYC 4005 series server was also much lower than the EPYC 7601 server for those running SOHO servers or similar that aren't always under constant load. The AMD EPYC 4005 Supermicro server drew around half the power at idle as the AMD EPYC 7601 Tyan 1P server.
On a performance-per-Watt basis for the average server power consumption and the geo mean performance, the EPYC 4585PX server was at 2.85x the performance-per-Watt of the EPYC Naples server. Quite a big stride in performance over the past eight years for AMD EPYC and the performance delivered now by even the low-end/cost-effective server solutions. At the top end, EPYC 7001 versus EPYC 9005 benchmarks are up next on the benchmarking agenda.
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