I don’t understand why AMD’s 192-core monster CPU ever is selling at almost 50% discount, just 4 months after it launched
AMD’s most powerful processor to date, the EPYC 9965, is being offered on eBay and other online retailers, at the time of writing, with discounts of up to 47%.
Compared to other similar instances I tracked before, the big difference is that there are far more EPYC 9965 on sale in the US than before and all the CPUs are brand new.
Launched in October 2024, the EPYC 9965 is AMD’s most expensive CPU with a suggested retail price of $14,813 and its most powerful as well with 192 Zen 5c cores and 384 threads. A search on eBay for 100-000000976, the OEM SKU (stock keeping unit) code for the 9965, brings up 10 results, all of them US-based and brand new.
This is the first of several articles based on data I’ve compiled on 41 AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 CPUs (socketed, OEM). In the rest of the series, I will be looking at the cost per core, performance per core, AMD CPUs that are getting more expensive, all this with the new Ryzen 9 9900/9950 X3D CPUs in the backdrop.
Some sellers offered the 9965 for as little as $8,250 when buying a pair; individual pricing started from $8,369. Oddly enough, searching for EPYC 9965 brought up several entries from mainland China. I estimate at 100 the total number of EPYC 9965 currently on sale on eBay.
On the open web, Wiredzone, a popular online US-based retailer stocks the EPYC 9965 for just over $10,000, a fair bit more expensive than eBay but it’s a recognized business. It has been at this price for more than three months now. About a dozen other retailers worldwide sell AMD’s flagship server processor for less than $11,000, a clear sign that supply is relatively abundant.
The EPYC 9965 requires a special motherboard if you plan to run a pair of them (because, why not). Experiencing 768 threads on one motherboard such as the Gigabyte MZ73-LM2 with up to 24 DIMM slots is something few of us will ever need, especially when such a dual-socket motherboard retails for about $2500 and requires a special casing. But if you want the best workstation out there, that’s a very good place to start.
So, why such a drop?
Demand for this particular type of processor, one which focusses on hyperscalers such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, has been one of the drivers of AMD’s success in the server market. AMD’s market share rose from nearly zero a decade or so ago to about 25% in 2024.
So what to make of the myriad of vendors that are selling this flagship, cutting-edge server processor for thousands of dollars less than the sticker price? Could excess inventory be a reason as to why prices have gone down so quickly on such a recent CPU?
But here’s the thing, during my research, I was shocked to see that the 9965 was not the only one to have such a big discount: the 9655P (up to 47%), the EPYC 9655 (up to 57%) and so on, and so forth all experienced big price drops.
Indeed, my snapshot survey of AMD’s 5th gen socketed CPUs (with a sprinkle of Threadripper), 41 CPUs in all, reveals that the majority of models have a discount of 20% or more once they hit retail.
History repeating itself
I began tracking this odd scenario back two years ago when I noticed that US retailers were selling the then-three month old EPYC 9954 processor with a massive 30% discount. A month later, in March 2023, I found that hundreds of used 64-core 3rd gen EPYC CPUs were being as Chinese hyperscalers rushed to upgrade their servers.
It looked like someone in the supply chain tried to make a quick buck off the ‘obsolete’ hardware with prices tumbling down to just over $1000 in June 2023. The same happened with the 128-core EPYC 9754 server processor which saw significant discounts but nothing on the scale I am seeing today.
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