AMD EPYC Milan-X CPU Pre-Orders Start at $4,300

AMD's EPYC Milan-X processors are finally available for preorder. Bottom Line Telecommunications (via momomo_us) has the entire Milan-X product stack up on its online store, with pricing spanning from $4,290.23 to $9,609.36.

Milan-X is the first AMD data center product to leverage 3D V-Cache technology, allowing the already core-heavy chips to rock up to 768MB of L3 cache. So we're looking at 3X the cache that you'd find in a vanilla EPYC Milan 7003 chip. However, as we've seen from Microsoft's tests and independent benchmarks from a news outlet, not all workloads benefit from 3D V-Cache. AMD has claimed that Milan-X offers up to a 50% performance boost, but only in "targeted workloads," so it won't be the case in workloads that are less cache-sensitive.

AMD was pretty vague with the specifications for Milan-X. During the announcement, the chipmaker detailed the innovative technology behind the huge L3 cache but only shared the core counts for the upcoming data center chips. From what we've seen so far from an early evaluation of the EPYC 7V73X, Milan-X may arrive with lower clock speeds but makes up for it with a better boost mechanism and the big L3 cache.

AMD EPYC Milan-X Pricing

*Specifications are unconfirmed.

The EPYC 7773X, the flagship Milan-X SKU, seemingly sells for $9,609.36. For comparison, the same store sells the regular EPYC 7763 for $8,616.41, so the Milan-X model carries an 11.5% premium. Nevertheless, it's not a bad price, considering that a previous B2B retailer had the EPYC 7773X up for $10,746.99.

When it comes to the 32-core SKUs, the EPYC 7573X retails for $6,107.88, while the EPYC 7543 goes for $4,139.74. That's the most significant price difference so far, at a 47.5% increase.

The remaining EPYC 7473X and EPYC 7373X have $4,290.23 and $5,137.38 price tags. However, it may be a pricing error since it seems illogical that a 24-core chip would cost less than a 16-core one, especially in the data center segment. In contrast, the EPYC 7443 and EPYC 7343 are available for $2,231.30 and $1,738.74, respectively, meaning the Milan-X counterparts are up to 92.3% and 195.5% more expensive.

Milan-X officially hits the market during the second quarter of this year; therefore, more retailers should have them in stock (or at least available for preorder). However, if you don't want to make a hefty investment, you can also contract Microsoft's Azure HBv3 Series VMs, which avidly utilize Milan-X processors.