So? The 10980XE - at least according to the
ark, is still in production. And the same applies to AMD. But why does it matter to you that no replacements are in the works? You are suggesting a CPU must be designated for a specific purpose in order for that class of computers to be supported. That is not true. It is like saying a computer "marketed" as a gaming computer cannot be used for CAD/CAE work. Not true. It can also "mine", search for a cure for cancer, compile a database, or be used to create a Word doc, an AI person or email.
I think ARK's information is out of date, ARK itself has gotten completely butchered lately, Intel seems to be no longer maintaining it. The 10980XE is already ~5 years old (being the second refinement of the 7980XE, released all the way back in 2017) and it's been unavailable to purchase outside of marketplace listings alongside X299 boards for a very long time now. It's still the most sought-after LGA2066 chip (being both the flagship and its most capable, versatile offering), although you can usually find the 7980XE for half the price if you can tolerate the slightly lower clocks and some of the hardware-level errata that the 9980XE and 10980XE ended up fixing. 9980XE's aren't worth getting at all since they cost more or less the same as the 10980XE in the used market.
AMD's offerings are available in
select retailers (meaning; few shops have them) but the problem with current generation Threadripper parts is that their prices are obscenely, insanely high. Zen 4 Threadripper
starts at $1500 for the lowest-end 24-core model (7960X). with motherboards that tend to start in the $800 range. Since they have no competition, they do just like Nvidia and charge whatever they want for their products.
NO! You are missing my point. You do not have to have a CPU designated as a workstation CPU to do workstation tasks. That's the point.
I think you misunderstood us all, Bill. We agree there is no explicit limitation preventing the system from being used for any given role, it's just that "mainstream platforms" have certain hardware limitations. The amount of CPU cores, instruction sets, expansion ports, memory slots - they're all quite limited compared to their HEDT counterparts, making them unsuitable for workstations that will deal with complex calculations or high-demand, high-throughput I/O. These limitations make the machine ill-suited for the role because it's just not fast enough to complete the task in a reasonable allotment of time, or it could be that it perhaps cannot store all the data required to process the workload - in some cases, depending on instruction set required, it won't even execute it (currently, AVX-512 workloads if we're talking Intel).
Even with a motherboard like the MSI Ace Z690/Z790 series, with 5 M.2 slots and 3 PCIe slots, you deal with lots of lane-splitting and bandwidth halving, bifurcation is a must if you mean to use most of the connectivity present on the board, and you are still limited to only 4 memory slots, or effectively half the memory capacity of an HEDT system. Just look at my build as per system specs, it takes the Z790 platform to almost its absolute extreme, and all I have is an SSD and a GPU plugged into the motherboard. All of the memory channels are populated and in use.
www.intel.com
Fiddlesticks! If I was planning a TR, then it would be another PC project in the trenches!
