AMD announced Threadripper Pro, their competitor for Intel Xeon W designed for
workstations back in July of 2020, and
it's taken us all the way until now to actually get our hands on one, and it's
still not available to the broader market. So, there is no way for you to
just go and buy one of these at your local store. Just kidding. AMD announced
retail Threadripper Pro while we were editing this video. They are expected to
be available in March, but dry those tears because we haven't even told you
if you should want one yet. To find out,
we'll be taking the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 for a little test drive. Yes, my
friends, this configuration right here has a sticker price of over
$18,000, but then there's a nearly $8,000 discount, which is like what what
is even happening here? I don't know what's going
on. It's really unusual for AMD to
restrict access to their products. I mean, even the fanciest epic server CPUs
are readily available on neweag.com. But these Threadripper Pros launched
exclusively alongside Lenovo's new ThinkStation P620 Workstation with no
publicly disclosed length to the term of exclusivity and no apparent intention
from AMD to sell these chips in anything other than OEM systems at all. Before we
get to talk about why they're exclusive though, let's talk about the CPUs for a
bit. When AMD launched first gen Ryzen and Threadripper, they were finally
re-entering the CPU market in a big way. On desktop, they had everything from
budget quad cores all the way up to 16 core monsters that targeted enthusiasts.
And they followed their desktop re-entry up with epic, which by its second
generation was spanking Intel in the server and data center market with
Threadripper Pro. Then they're finally coming back to the last major computing
market, Workstation. And that's for the first time since AMD Opteron was a
thing. Back in those days though, the distinction between a desktop and a
workstation was a lot more clear. If you
wanted lots of RAM, ECC RAM, many CPU
cores, which usually required multiple CPUs on a single board, or if you needed
lots of PCI Express expansion, workstation was sort of your only
option. Since then though, regular Thread Rippers like our test bench right
here, along with Ryzen's semi-universal support for unregistered ECC memory, and
for that matter, the way that Intel's HD chips moved to very high core counts and
more PCI Express lanes to counter AMD's threat mean that the line has blurred a
lot, especially considering that relatively speaking, the cost of these
CPUs is not actually that exorbitant.
from a certain point of view. So why would AMD launch this Threadripper Pro
based on their soon-to-bereed Zen 2 architecture? The lineup consists of
four models, a 64 core, a 32 core, and
yes, that is correct. Both 16 and 12
core models. Our unit here is equipped with the
3975WX, a 32 core with a 3.5 GHz base
clock and 4.2 2 GHz boost. Now, it along
with the 64 core model has an obvious
nonprothread ripper counterpart, so
those will be easy to compare to. But 16
and 12 core, well, those would be very
interesting for folks who want Mondo RAM bandwidth and PCI Express lanes, but
don't actually want a ton of cores. What
else actually sets them apart, though? The most glaring difference is clock
speeds. On the 32 and 64 core models,
both base and boost clocks are lower on
the Pro chips, but this kind of makes
sense as it's likely to help them better conform to thermal limits and to help
improve their stability. You're also not going to have certain features that you
enjoy on regular Threadripper, like the ability to overclock the CPUs or the
memory. As for the 12 and 16 core models, oddly these have really high
base clocks, nearly 4 GHz on both of them, which is actually higher than
their Zen 3 gaming equivalents. So, they
might pack a hefty punch for certain applications. But unfortunately, we
don't have them on hand because we can't just go buy one to pop in here and see
how it goes. Speaking of which, I mean, how proprietary is this thing? Got a
little Skeatic there. Oh, that's interesting. 1 2 7 and eight. Is this 8
channel memory?
Oo. Wait. So that means with only four
DIMs installed, we're not even taking advantage of it all. Gosh darn it. Oh,
wow. It tips real easy. Oh, interesting. That's because it's using a very
proprietary VL looking power supply. So
this is a 12vt only power supply meaning that any conversion to five or 3.3 volt
is actually done on the motherboard rather than on the power supply which
means that this motherboard is also going to be very proprietary though.
That would explain the uh cooler that it's got right here with these 12vt
connectors going. Wait, where do they run to?
Hello. Oh, these Oh, okay. These are for
graphics cards. So, the graphics card auxiliary power comes from the side of
the motherboard there. And then, no way. Oh, that's trippy. There's a handle here
for the power supply that goes into like a solid almost looks like a PCI Express
8X slot or something connector on the board. Huh. It's amazing how much
engineering, you know, the OEM system integrators do for like to reinvent
standards that mostly kind of exist.
Good for
you. What else we got here? We got uh one, two, three, four, five. Got lots of
PCI Express expansion. All of these 16x
slots are like fully pinned out. I mean, that makes sense because there's 128 PCI
Express lanes on this thing. Cooling is a little funny on this thing. There's
all this ventilation room at the front. like it's completely open, but there's
only a single 92mm fan in there when it looks like they could easily have a 120
or even a 140. And then the back is just a single 92mm fan. Again, this is like
this RTX 6000 Quadro graphics card and a
32 core CPU. You'd think they'd put a little bit more air flow in it. Oh,
that's fun. When's the last time you saw a RAM cooler? Surface level weirdness
aside, there's actually some deeper weirdness to talk about in here. While
it looks the same as a normal Threadripper, you know, get your CPU and your
motherboard and all that, underneath that trippy cooler is an allnew platform
called WRX80 with a new socket in it
that's called SWRX8. Now, there's not a ton of
information out there about it because we aren't getting any retail motherboards with this platform and this
socket, but we do know some key differences from the launch event, which
include most of Threadripper Pro's selling points. So, we're talking 128
lanes of PCI Express Gen 4 connectivity, eight channel memory with a max capacity
of two terabytes, up from quad channel with 256 gigs of max capacity, support
for registered ECC memory, which might help us explain the coolers on the uh
RAM sticks there, full memory encryption, and AMD Pro management. So,
on the surface, it seems like this is just a slightly modified epic CPU on a
server board, but with extra steps. But
if you look closely, AMD server boards
don't have a chipset because Epic is
technically an
SOC. This board does have a chipset.
That's how it has support for workstation features like AMD's RAID
configurator. Epic has no such thing.
Weirdness aside, we can still make some educated guesses as to how this system
will behave. And overall, I'm expecting gaming performance to of course be worse
with Threadripper Pro definitely having the upper hand in anything that requires
lots and lots of memory capacity and bandwidth. Remember, if you fully kit
out a 64 core 3990X with 256 gigs of
RAM, that leaves you with only 2 gigs of RAM per thread. Pretty measly figure for
some professional and commercial applications, but let's try it out for
real. Drag race time. One, two, three,
go. Threadripper versus Threadripper
Pro. Big showdown.
Yeah. And in a big surprise to
absolutely nobody when you've got architecturally basically the same
bloody thing. Um, but like one of them is clocked better. One of them will give
be slightly faster. Yeah, now we know.
Hey, thanks Linus Tech Tips. Wait. Oh,
damn it. I forgot to tell it to run ah only one time.
45,400 41,800. Of course, Cinebench is not the
beall and endall of CPU performance. So, we've taken the liberty of running a few
more benchmarks to demonstrate that yes, in fact, water is wet and the sky is
blue. But what about pricing? Because these CPUs are only available from
Lenovo in a pre-built form, we don't
really have like an MSRP for them, leaving us to go off of the pricing on
Lenovo's website, which is frankly
terrifying. The price difference between the 12 core and the 64 core is nearly
$15,000. Holy shikes. But then there's
like the multi,000 discounts or whatever. So, we just have no idea. As
for the exclusivity, we don't know specifically what AMD's intentions. It
really is weird how companies can be cy about the strangest things, isn't it?
Um, but we can at least make some educated guesses. First off, when
launching a product aimed at professionals, the understanding is that
many of the aforementioned professionals don't want to or don't have the time to
spec and build custom machines. They're probably ordering in bulk, likely
through their IT department. That means that focusing on an OEM like Dell, HP,
or Lenovo could actually make sense since the people that AMD expects to
actually buy these CPUs likely don't have much interest in retail chips. It
can also lower the overall development cost and the time frame of releasing a
product significantly if you limit the scope of compatibility. AMD clearly knew
that Zen 3 was coming when they started this project. So, if you only have one
system model available at launch, that means you only have to optimize one BIOS
and you only have to work with one company during development. If you were
working with a whackload of retail board partners, like they do for something
like Ryzen, that could easily delay something like this by weeks or even
months, by which time there might not be any point launching it at all. It can
also help save on distribution and marketing costs because they would be
shared with your OEM partner, which in this case would be Lenovo. The
unfortunate side effect of this is that we have much more limited variety as
consumers or proumers. Fewer motherboard
manufacturers means less choice if you want cool features like IPMI for remote
management, Thunderbolt for high-speed connectivity, etc., etc., at least for
now. As for what I think, well, I'm kind
of pissed off because I just bought a
bunch of new regular Thread Rippers for our video editors and now they're going
to be obsolete. So, thanks AMD. But I'm
also grateful because thanks to AMD building cool shizz all the time, CPUs
actually get obsolete again instead of just being re-released with the same
re-imagined technology over and over again.
So, thanks AMD. But that's why I never reuse my
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sell so many of those. Yeah, go check out our 100 GB networking if you're into
this kind of like super crazy workstation stuff. We actually featured this system there. Certainly got the
certainly got the IO for