Thousands of cheap 64-core AMD EPYC CPUs have gone on sale on eBay, Aliexpress
As you might expect, just months after AMD officially launched its fourth-generation “Genoa” EPYC processor family based on the Zen 4 microarchitecturesecond-hand marketplaces such as eBay and Aliexpress are flooded with third-generation “Milan” EPYC processorsmany of which are 64 cores/128 threads and launched in 2021: these are the 7773X, the 7763, the 7713P and the 7713.
Prices have dropped significantly since Genoa-based EPYC CPUs are widely available in the market with 64-core CPUs routinely available for around $2,000.
For comparison: a second-hand AMD Ryzen Wire ripper PRO 3995WX (also 64-core/128-threads) sells for about $6,000; these are popular in workstation PCs while EPYC is primarily focused on servers.
AMD going big in China?
There are currently over 100 listings for it 64-core 3rd generation EPYC processors on eBay (opens in new tab) with most sellers shipping from China with free international shipping and often over 10 units per sale. There are also dozens of other offerings for the older, 2nd generation “Rome” EPYC CPU that came out in 2019 and also sport 64 cores.
Same story on Aliexpress where there are hundreds of 3rd gen EPYC processors for sale, with a few sellers offering a minimum of 100 pieces (opens in new tab). Now the export of certain American computer components related to AI training to China is not allowed. At the time of writing, that includes only some of the more powerful ones Datacenter GPU (AMD MI200, NVIDIA A100, NVIDIA H100) and does not extend to AMD EPYC or Intel XEON processors for now.
It’s probably Chinese hyperscalers have begun receiving large quantities of the latest EPYC processors and are doing rapid server refreshes in anticipation of an abrupt decision by the US government to ban the sale of high performance CPUs. This means ripping and replacing existing components as Genoa supports PCIe 5.0 and DDR5.
Super computing power for little money
Now is the best time to grab those 64-core chips to build yourself a powerful workstation. Buy two 7003 processors for a total of 256 threads and 128 cores, connect them to a compatible motherboard (e.g. the Supermicro H12DSi-NT6 or the ROME2D16-2L+), add up to 4 TB of ECC DDR4 memory and different bits and bobs (GPU, SSD, riser cards, PSU, etc.) depending on your usage situation.
If you go the DIY route, you’re likely to save a significant amount of money. Server specialist Broadberry sells a high performance workstation, the CyberStation Performancewith two 64-core CPUs (EPYC 7713), 16 GB of RAM, and no hard drive for just over $20,000 before sales tax.
EPYC processors are generally still very, very capable parts, especially for computational, data-intensive tasks. The 7773X ranks third in PassMark’s popular CPU Marking Benchmark, behind only the current fastest CPU in the world, the EPYC 9654, and the Ryzen ThreadRipperPro 5995WX.