Sure, if you're tinkering at home where the stakes are low and your time is free. You can also save a bunch of money running Xeon engineering samples. But if

Sure, if you're tinkering at home where the stakes are low and your time is free. You can also save a bunch of money running Xeon engineering samples. But if your production environment goes tits-up then your savings go out the window and a whole lot more besides. And that's what you're risking by running a hardware configuration that is non-validated/unsupported. People constantly make the mistake of assuming that businesses need to pinch pennies on their money-generating assets, just like they do on the rigs they use for entertainment at home. In the business world, reliability and official support trump an extra $1k in your pocket every time. Forget Xeons entirely: there are still a lot of customers who buy Sun/Oracle/IBM hardware even though it costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars extra. $1k does not even register for a lot of businesses. (ECC is validated on Epyc, of course - but the prices are a lot closer to Xeons there, it's no longer a slam-dunk. You have to look at it on a case-by-case basis to determine which is actually a better deal for your workload. And frankly AMD has been doing an undue amount of massaging on their benchmarks here, like in their launch data where they just straight-up removed 43% from all the Intel benchmarks. ) http://techreport.com/review/32125/amd-epyc-7000-series-cpus-revealed/2 http://techreport.com/review/32125/amd-epyc-7000-series-cpus...