Intel has not been having a great time recently. Their 7nm process may now be pushed back as far as 2023 and AMD’s Ryzen 3000 processors are matching the IPC numbers while offering more cores at a lower price. This has led to some very welcome price cuts on the Intel side of the fence, but no real competition in the form of new products.
AMD on the other hand, has been absolutely relentless. The plucky CPU underdog keeps churning out new and improved products and suddenly has the attention of major system builders both on desktop and laptop platforms. The two upcoming major gaming consoles are also stuffed with AMD tech, which makes it feel like a new golden age for AMD.
Their new 64-core Threadripper Pro is doing nothing to help Intel sleep better at night. Aimed squarely at the Xeon-W line of processors, there’s a lot to love about this behemoth of a chip.
Meet The ThreadRipper Pro Family
There are four CPUs in the Threadripper Pro lineup. Starting with the baby of the group at “only” 12 cores and 24 threads. That’s The 3945WX which also sports the highest base and boost clocks of the lot.
The 3955WX adds four cores to the mix with no penalty on the clock speed front, other than a 100Mhz drop on the base clock to 3.9Ghz. This seems to be the best model in terms of balance between per-core performance and total number of cores for users who don’t need more cores or threads for their workloads.
The 3975WX is basically half of the flagship, with 32-cores and a 3.5 Ghz base clock. It also has exactly half the cache. Overall we expect it will perform just slightly over half as well, taking inter-core communication and other overhead into account.
Which leaves the range-topping 3995WX with a monstrous 64 cores and a base clock of 2.7Ghz, sharing the same boost clock as the 32-core model at 4.2 Ghz and a staggering 256MB of L3 cache.
It’s worth highlighting that despite the large base clock variance, all of these chips have a boost clock of either 4.2 or 4.3 Ghz. So applications that only use a small number of cores won’t suffer performance losses.
It’s All About The Extras
While this sort of multi-threaded processing power is wonderful at the price point, it’s the value-added features you get with Threadripper Pro that sets it apart. Every single Threadripper Pro has 128 PCI3 4.0 lanes. They all support eight-channel DDR4-3200 memory. That makes them excellent choices for workloads that need multi-GPU muscle, but only relies on CPU power to coordinate things and shift data from around.
A Matter Of Motherboards
The Threadripper Pro uses the same socket design as ThreadRipper, but the pins are not compatible. Which means you’ll specifically have to buy a WRX80 motherboard to use one. That’s a good thing, since there’s little point in pairing a Threadripper Pro with a motherboard that does not support the 2TB of RAM or multi-GPU configurations that Threadripper Pro does.
Not that you can buy Threadripper Pro as an of-the-shelf upgrade. For now it seems that Threadripper Pro is meant for pre-built systems, which means you should look out for future Titan machines that take full advantage of this hot new AMD chip.
