AMD Intros Single-Socket EPYC 8005 “Sorano” CPUs For Telco and Edge

Ahead of next week’s Mobile World Congress 2026 trade show, AMD is taking the wraps off of its next generation of server processors aimed at the telecommunications and edge markets: the EPYC 8005 series. Codenamed “Sorano”, these upcoming chips will bring the Zen 5 architecture to the final segment of the EPYC lineup that is still based around AMD’s Zen 4 tech, giving the lower-cost server market a shot in the arm in regards to performance and features.

AMD Intros Single-Socket EPYC 8005 “Sorano” CPUs For Telco and Edge

At a high level, the EPYC 8005 series chips will offer up to 84 Zen 5 CPU cores, with a maximum TDP of 225 Watts. As AMD’s announcement this week is closer to a teaser than a full launch, the company is not publishing the full specification and chip SKU lists at this time – so we do not know how low this chip stack goes in the other direction. Though for reference, the current EPYC 8004 series goes as low as 8 CPU cores and as high as 64 CPU cores. So compared to the family of chips it replaces, the EPYC 8005 series is going to offer upwards of 20 more CPU cores in a single package. Presumably, these will all be Zen5c cores, as the 8004 used AMD’s dense Zen 4 cores as well.

On the feature side of matters, ahead of a more detailed announcement, one interesting tidbit in AMD’s telco-focused blog post mentions that AMD has introduced “decoding optimizations” for Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) calculations – a form of forward error correction used in layer 1 networking. The blog post is otherwise light on the technical details – it sounds like they may just be leveraging AMD’s standard vector units – but this is notably the first time that AMD has ever promoted LDPC acceleration as a feature in EPYC processors.

Otherwise, power consumption on this generation is going up a bit – at least in the top SKUs. Whereas the EPYC 8004 series topped out at a stock TDP of 200 Watts (not counting cTDPs going higher), the EPYC 8005 series will top out at 225 Watts. Though on the whole, this is still being promoted as AMD’s energy-efficient option, especially compared to the monstrous EPYC 9005 series chips, which top out at a toasty 500 Watts.

Final Words

Once these chips launch later this year – AMD has not provided a specific launch date – they will be going up against Intel’s Xeon 6 SoCs, aka Granite Rapids-D. We will wait to see how benchmarks pan out, but it is noteworthy that AMD will have a slight edge in core count (GNR-D tops out at 80 cores), though likely trailing in memory bandwidth. Regardless, expect to see everyone put on their best face for MWC next week.