Tuesday, March 2nd 2021
AMD Releases Threadripper Pro Workstation CPUs to the DIY Market
Remember AMD's Threadripper Pro CPUs which went on sale in prebuilt workstations? Well, they're now available for the general public in boxed CPU offerings - if you have the cash for them. The platform offers support for up to 2 TB of DRAM through its eight-channel configuration, 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0 connectivity, and up to 64 cores (128 Threads with the company's Simultaneous Multi Threading [SMT] technology). The best motherboards for these productivity beasts are, according to AMD, WRX80-based motherboards, which start at a pretty negligible $999.
The company's lineup tops out at the flagship Threadripper PRO 3995WX, which is a 64-core/128-thread max-out of the "Rome" MCM, with a max boost frequency of 4.20 GHz ($5,489). Next up is the Threadripper PRO 3975WX, which is a 32-core/64-thread part, clocked up to 4.20 GHz boost ($2,749). Following this, is the Threadripper PRO 3955WX, a 16-core/32-thread part clocked up to 4.30 GHz boost ($1,149). The Threadripper PRO 3945WX, a 12-core/24-thread part clocked up to 4.30 GHz boost, is apparently absent from this release. If you need the current best from AMD apart from their EPYC CPUs, it doesn't get much better than this.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
The company's lineup tops out at the flagship Threadripper PRO 3995WX, which is a 64-core/128-thread max-out of the "Rome" MCM, with a max boost frequency of 4.20 GHz ($5,489). Next up is the Threadripper PRO 3975WX, which is a 32-core/64-thread part, clocked up to 4.20 GHz boost ($2,749). Following this, is the Threadripper PRO 3955WX, a 16-core/32-thread part clocked up to 4.30 GHz boost ($1,149). The Threadripper PRO 3945WX, a 12-core/24-thread part clocked up to 4.30 GHz boost, is apparently absent from this release. If you need the current best from AMD apart from their EPYC CPUs, it doesn't get much better than this.
32 Comments on AMD Releases Threadripper Pro Workstation CPUs to the DIY Market
nl.hardware.info/nieuws/75356/monsterlijk-asus-threadripper-pro-moederbord-officieel-voor-2-tb-ram-en-veel-pcie-40-lanes
The 16 core is listed currently on Newegg U.S for $1150
Heck, with those specs maxed out you can stick some relatively affordable Quadro RTX cards in it (apparently NVidia has vGPU licensing for those as GRID/Tesla) and run a huge team of devs, or even bigger team of generic office workers off a single WS.... or just be a total douchebag and run the worlds most expensive ETH mining farm with 7 watercooled RTX3090s :D
That's the thing about workstations: they need to be both a client device with high GHz (UI-threads, plugins, etc. etc. are usually single-threaded) AND a... well... workstation with tons of cores for Rendering / whatever.
Your fancy Raytracer might be well-parallelized and utilize 128-threads nice and well. But random custom-loader that was written by Intern #15 that loads/saves the level data in some XML / JSON abomination is going to be single-threaded bound and probably written (poorly) in Python. I mean, ycombinator / Hacker News completely blew up a few days ago when a single-threaded "sscanf" performance issue was tracked down as the reason why GTAV levels took so damn long to load (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339)
On the other hand, if there are institutional discount for TR PRO, it will be a completely different story XD
You can tell its built for pros by its lack of RGB.. all work and no play yawn.
:laugh:
But in the future: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_photonics
Yeah, EPYC is probably better for your use case. Threadripper Pro seems like it should be more expensive than single-socket EPYC. Dual-socket EPYC might still be more expensive.