AMD EPYC 9965 (Turin Dense)

192 Zen 5c cores on a single socket makes the EPYC 9965 the densest server chip shipping in 2026, and the SPEC CPU 2017 integer benchmark shows what that density buys: 2.7 times the throughput of Intel's Xeon Platinum 8952+, not an incremental gap but the kind that forces a procurement team to actually reconsider its Intel defaults. Existing Genoa customers aren't safe from the upgrade itch either — a 37% IPC gain over the previous generation is a real reason to refresh even recently deployed racks. At $8,000-15,000 per socket it's not cheap, but for large-scale deployments the performance-per-dollar and performance-per-watt math still comes out ahead.