AMD vs Intel Dedicated Servers in 2026: 109 Plans Priced per Core

Search for AMD vs Intel dedicated server and you get a dozen vendor blogs arguing architecture. Zen 5 against Granite Rapids, IPC deltas per watt. Almost none of them print a price, and not one prints a competitor's price. So we did the boring version: took every dedicated server in our database on 21 September 2026, looked up the actual CPU model in each one, counted the physical cores, and divided.

The result is not what the vendor essays imply. Intel cores are cheaper. Median $9.68 per physical core per month against AMD's $13.06, a 26% gap in Intel's favour across 106 plans at 12 hosts.

Then you look at what those Intel cores actually are. The median Intel chip on sale is from 2019. The median AMD chip is from 2022. Nearly two thirds of the Intel inventory runs silicon launched in 2019 or earlier, against a fifth of the AMD inventory. What reads as a vendor discount is mostly a discount on age.

What is in the sample

Snapshot taken 21 September 2026, 01:33 UTC, from our nightly scrape.

• 215 active dedicated plans with a price, across 21 providers
• 167 of them currently orderable (the rest are catalogue entries their host lists as out of stock)
• 109 orderable plans name a CPU we can identify and a core count, across 12 hosts
• Three of those 109 carry a GPU that sets the price rather than the CPU (Hetzner GEX45 and GEX131, OVHcloud RISE-GPU-1). They are held out of every median below, which leaves 106
• A further 58 orderable plans publish a core count but no CPU model, so they appear in the price-per-core ranking and nowhere in the vendor or generation cuts

Core counts are physical cores, never threads. Where the plan text gives a number we use it; where it does not (OVHcloud and InMotion publish model names only) we take the count from the part's spec sheet. Euro prices convert at a flat 1.15 and are quoted in euro as well, because that is what the invoice says.

Price per core by chip launch year

Forget the logos for a moment and sort the same 106 plans by the year their processor shipped.

A core from 2023 or later costs 56% more than a core from 2017 to 2019. That single column does more work than every vendor-versus-vendor comparison on the first page of Google.

Now split each era by vendor, which is the comparison the architecture blogs claim to be making.

Two things fall out. In the 2017 to 2019 era the vendors are within 6% of each other, which is noise. And in the newest era the sign flips: Intel's seven current-generation plans are 23% dearer per core than AMD's thirty. The brand premium everyone argues about is real, it just points in different directions depending on which year you shop in, and it is smaller than the gap between any two years.

There is no AMD column before 2017 because there is no AMD silicon that old on sale. Naples shipped in 2017 and the hosts that still rack pre-2017 boxes are running Xeons.

AMD vs Intel inside a single host

Cross-provider medians are useful for shape but they mix datacentres, networks and support tiers. The cleaner test is a host that sells both vendors at the same core count.

Four of the six gaps are under 15%. Two are zero to the cent. The one big number, Vultr's 6-core pair, is a 2019 Xeon against a 2025 EPYC, so it is a generation gap wearing a vendor costume.

The Hetzner row has a third plan that makes the point better than any of this. Hetzner sells the same EPYC 9454P twice: once as AX162 in its own chassis at €614, and once as DX182 in a Dell PowerEdge at €724. Identical processor, identical 48 cores, identical 128 GB of DDR5 ECC. The Dell badge costs €110 a month, which is 17.9%. That is more than Hetzner charges to move you from AMD to Intel at the same core count. The chassis brand is a bigger line item than the CPU brand.

All three Hetzner figures were checked against hetzner.com on the day of writing, not just against our own scrape: AX162 €614.00, DX154 €704.00, DX182 €724.00, all excluding VAT, all at the German locations.

The clearest example: €59 at Hetzner

Hetzner has exactly two dedicated servers at €59.00 a month. They are also the only two of its fifteen with no setup fee.

Same price, same memory, 2.3x the cores. If you read only the vendor blogs you would expect the AMD box to be the core-count bargain. It is the opposite, because the i5-13500 is a 2023 hybrid part and the Ryzen 5 3600 is a six-core chip from 2019 that Hetzner has been selling for years.

One honest qualifier the marketing pages skip: those 14 cores are not 14 of the same thing. The i5-13500 is 6 performance cores plus 8 efficiency cores. For a build farm, a CI runner or anything embarrassingly parallel that is a genuine 14, and at $4.85 a core it is the best modern-silicon deal in the whole sample. For a single-threaded latency workload you have 6 fast cores and 8 helpers. Hetzner's EX63 has the same shape: Core Ultra 7 265, 20 cores, of which 8 are performance cores.

While we were verifying those two prices on hetzner.com we pulled the setup fees, which no price-per-core table anywhere seems to include:

Half a month up front on everything except the two €59 boxes. On a three-month project that quietly adds 17% to the bill.

What a newer generation costs at the same host

The strongest evidence for the generation thesis is inside a single provider, same vendor, same core count, different silicon year. Only like-for-like billing terms are compared here, because a monthly list price against a two-year committed rate will produce any multiple you want.

InterServer's ladder is the cleanest because all three rungs are plain monthly prices at one provider: EPYC 7402P from 2019 at $399, 7443P from 2021 at $450, 9254 from 2022 at $720. Twenty-four cores each time. The bill goes up 80% while the core count stays put.

Liquid Web deserves a footnote, and it is the kind of footnote that should make you distrust round numbers in other people's tables. Our database records $167.50 a month for the 16-core Xeon 6226R, which would make the jump to the 6526Y look like a 2.9x increase. It is not. The $167.50 is Liquid Web's "50% off first 2 months" intro rate and it renews at $335, while the 6526Y figure we store is a two-year committed rate whose monthly equivalent is $564. Matched term against matched term, both the monthly pair and the two-year pair give the same answer: 1.68x.

Two counter-examples keep this honest. Vultr sells the Xeon E-2288G (2019) and E-2388G (2021) as 8-core, 128 GB bare metal boxes at exactly $350 each. Two years of silicon, zero price difference. And OVHcloud's €85.49 price point buys either a 16-core EPYC 7371 from 2019, an 8-core Ryzen 7 5800X from 2020, or a 6-core EPYC 4244P from 2024. Same money, $6.14 versus $12.29 versus $16.39 per core, a 2.67x spread inside one price point at one provider.

Cheapest dedicated server per core, and the other end

Across the 106 orderable, vendor-identified plans the spread is 17.4x, from $2.82 to $49.17 per core per month. Drop Vultr's bare metal line, which is its own pricing universe, and it is still 11.2x.

That last row is the one worth staring at. RISE-XL is a 48-core Turin part, current generation, at $6.83 per core. Hetzner's AX162, a 48-core Genoa from 2022, is $14.71 per core. Both are single-socket European boxes with DDR5 ECC. The 2.2x between them comes from two companies picking different margins, one on a two-year signature and one on a month-to-month box.

At the expensive end the story is entirely about who is selling, not what:

InMotion's three managed tiers land on exactly $30.00 per core, which is not a coincidence, it is a price list built on a per-core rate card. Hetzner's SX295 is a storage server: 256 GB of RAM, two NVMe drives and fourteen 22 TB hard disks, so its CPU-normalised number badly overstates what you are paying for compute. Vultr's bare metal sits three to ten times above the same chip elsewhere because you are renting hourly billing and an API, not a server.

Price per core by host

Median across every orderable, vendor-identified plan each host sells.

The billing column is not decoration. OVHcloud's $9.10 assumes you sign for 24 months; Ultahost's $17.07 assumes 36. Servarica's single row is a plan advertised as “20 to 24 cores” and we counted 20, the conservative end, which is why one plan gets to sit at the top. Contabo's figure is its 12-month rate, and at the plain monthly price its median moves from $10.91 to roughly $12.46. Compare hosts across this table and you are comparing commitments as much as hardware. Our dedicated hosting category page has the full plan-level detail for each of these.

Management is priced separately and, at least at HostPapa, it is a flat fee rather than a percentage. Unmanaged Spark $59.95 becomes Managed Spark $109.95. Pulse $99.95 becomes $149.95. Drive, Ignite and Surge all do the same thing: exactly $50.00 a month, from the smallest box to the $524.95 one. HostPapa does not publish CPU models, so those plans sit outside the vendor index, but the pattern is worth knowing before you assume managed hosting scales with server size.

On the cloud side the brand is nearly free

Bare metal is where vendor choice costs money. On virtual machines it mostly does not.

DigitalOcean sells its Basic Premium droplets in an Intel version and an AMD version at nine matched shapes. Intel costs exactly 8/7 of AMD on every single one, a 14.29% premium that never varies:

The Intel droplet ships 1.4x to 1.6x the NVMe at every size. The surcharge buys disk, and the CPU brand comes along for the ride.

Vultr goes further. Its High Performance line is sold in both flavours, and the vendor is exposed in the public plans API as a cpu_vendor field, so this is checkable in one curl. All eight shapes, from 1 vCPU / 1 GiB at $6 up to 12 vCPU / 24 GiB at $144, are identical in price, RAM, NVMe and bandwidth between the AMD and Intel versions. Not close. The same number. Vultr's High Frequency line, also Intel, matches those prices at the four overlapping shapes and adds 25% to 33% more NVMe, while halving the transfer allowance from 2 TB to 1 TB.

If you have been choosing cloud instances by CPU vendor and expecting a discount, there is no discount to find at Vultr and a 14.29% disk-shaped one at DigitalOcean. We went through the related question of dedicated versus shared vCPU pricing in a separate piece, and the per-gigabyte-of-RAM view in this one.

Dedicated prices barely move

We snapshot every plan nightly, which means we can say how long these numbers have actually held rather than just quoting today's page.

Of the 167 orderable dedicated plans, 123 (73.7%) have shown exactly one price across our entire series. Not one change. Some specifics:

• OVHcloud: 31 of 31 plans unchanged across 148 days of readings, from 1 April 2026 to today. The entire Eco, Rise and Advance catalogue, frozen.
• PebbleHost: 8 of 8 unchanged across 159 days of readings, since 17 March 2026.
• Vultr bare metal: 10 of 10 unchanged, eight of them from 22 February 2026, where our series begins.
• Namecheap is the exception. Only 5 of its 12 plans have held one price, and the Dual Xeon Gold 5218 has carried five different prices over 179 days of readings. If you are quoting Namecheap dedicated pricing, date your quote.
• IONOS changed all 10 of its dedicated plans at least once, Contabo all 4, InMotion all 5.

So the per-core table above is not a one-day photograph for most of this market. For three quarters of it, the plan has never once shown us a different number since we started reading it. You can watch the ones that do move on our price trends page.

Where this table could mislead you

Corrections we would want applied to somebody else's price-per-core article, applied to ours.

The price basis is not uniform. We use the lowest advertised monthly-equivalent each host shows, and hosts advertise on different commitments: OVHcloud on 24 months, Contabo on 12, Ultahost and Bluehost on 36, Hetzner and Namecheap and InterServer and Vultr and PebbleHost on plain monthly. Comparing OVHcloud's $9.10 to Hetzner's $14.71 compares a two-year signature to a month-to-month one.

Intro rates hide inside monthly prices. Liquid Web's $167.50 is half price for two months. We caught it because the same record carries a $335 renewal figure. Where a host does not publish a renewal price, we cannot catch it at all, which is a problem we wrote about in our study of which hosts publish renewal pricing.

A core is not a core. Hybrid Intel desktop parts inflate the count against server Xeons and EPYCs. Dual-socket 2017 Xeons give you 56 cheap cores with 2017 per-core performance and 2017 memory bandwidth. An EPYC Turin core and a Xeon E5 core from 2013 are the same row in this table and nothing alike in a benchmark. Price per core is a purchasing metric, not a performance one.

Out-of-stock plans are excluded, and some of them are the cheap ones. OVHcloud's KS-B at €9.49 would be $2.73 per core and would top the cheapest list, but you cannot order it, so it is not in the ranking. Seventeen OVHcloud plans are in that state right now, along with all seven of Private Hosting's and fourteen of Servarica's fifteen.

Two data points we are deliberately not making claims about. Hetzner's dedicated price history before 11 September 2026 is unusable in our series: our scraper alternated between the price of the currently available configuration and the base catalogue price on the same plan on the same night, so AX162 shows both €319 and €614 in overlapping runs. The current values are catalogue prices and we verified all thirteen of them against hetzner.com rather than trusting the series. And Ultahost's ULTA-X11 is advertised as "64-Core AMD EPYC 9454" although that part has 48 cores; we used their number and flag it here.

What I would actually buy

Four workloads, four picks, with the number that decides each one.

Cheapest usable cores, throughput work, you do not care about per-core speed. OVHcloud KS-7: EPYC 7451, 24 cores, €58.89 on a two-year term, $2.82 per core. Nothing else in the sample is within 60% of it. Naples cores from 2017 are slow and the memory subsystem shows its age, so this is a build farm or a batch queue, not a database.

Cheap cores that are actually fast. Hetzner EX44 at €59, no setup fee, $4.85 per core. Six Raptor Lake performance cores clock higher than anything on the budget lists and the eight efficiency cores are free parallelism. Verified live on hetzner.com on 21 September 2026.

Many cores for a database. Namecheap's Dual Xeon Gold 5218 at $160.64 gives 32 cores and 128 GB for $5.02 a core. If you want newer silicon for the same job, the Dual EPYC 7313 at $170.24 is $9.60 more per month. That $9.60 is the entire "AMD premium" at this size, and it buys you Milan instead of Cascade Lake. Take it. Then date your quote, because Namecheap is the one host here that moves its dedicated prices.

Current generation, single socket, production. OVHcloud RISE-XL: 48 Turin cores at $6.83 each. Hetzner's AX162 is 2.2x the per-core price for 2022 Genoa, and the reasons to pay it are the monthly term and the network, not the chip.

The pattern under all four: in September 2026, on 106 servers we can price by the core, the launch year of the processor moves the number far more than the logo printed on it. Anyone selling you an AMD-versus-Intel decision without telling you the model year is selling you the wrong variable.

Originally published at hostingsift.com.