WEBVTT

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AMD announced Threadripper Pro, their competitor for Intel Xeon W designed for

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workstations back in July of 2020, and

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it's taken us all the way until now to actually get our hands on one, and it's

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still not available to the broader market. So, there is no way for you to

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just go and buy one of these at your local store. Just kidding. AMD announced

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retail Threadripper Pro while we were editing this video. They are expected to

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be available in March, but dry those tears because we haven't even told you

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if you should want one yet. To find out,

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we'll be taking the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 for a little test drive. Yes, my

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friends, this configuration right here has a sticker price of over

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$18,000, but then there's a nearly $8,000 discount, which is like what what

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is even happening here? I don't know what's going

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on. It's really unusual for AMD to

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restrict access to their products. I mean, even the fanciest epic server CPUs

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are readily available on neweag.com. But these Threadripper Pros launched

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exclusively alongside Lenovo's new ThinkStation P620 Workstation with no

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publicly disclosed length to the term of exclusivity and no apparent intention

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from AMD to sell these chips in anything other than OEM systems at all. Before we

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get to talk about why they're exclusive though, let's talk about the CPUs for a

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bit. When AMD launched first gen Ryzen and Threadripper, they were finally

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re-entering the CPU market in a big way. On desktop, they had everything from

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budget quad cores all the way up to 16 core monsters that targeted enthusiasts.

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And they followed their desktop re-entry up with epic, which by its second

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generation was spanking Intel in the server and data center market with

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Threadripper Pro. Then they're finally coming back to the last major computing

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market, Workstation. And that's for the first time since AMD Opteron was a

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thing. Back in those days though, the distinction between a desktop and a

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workstation was a lot more clear. If you

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wanted lots of RAM, ECC RAM, many CPU

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cores, which usually required multiple CPUs on a single board, or if you needed

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lots of PCI Express expansion, workstation was sort of your only

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option. Since then though, regular Thread Rippers like our test bench right

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here, along with Ryzen's semi-universal support for unregistered ECC memory, and

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for that matter, the way that Intel's HD chips moved to very high core counts and

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more PCI Express lanes to counter AMD's threat mean that the line has blurred a

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lot, especially considering that relatively speaking, the cost of these

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CPUs is not actually that exorbitant.

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from a certain point of view. So why would AMD launch this Threadripper Pro

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based on their soon-to-bereed Zen 2 architecture? The lineup consists of

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four models, a 64 core, a 32 core, and

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yes, that is correct. Both 16 and 12

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core models. Our unit here is equipped with the

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3975WX, a 32 core with a 3.5 GHz base

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clock and 4.2 2 GHz boost. Now, it along

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with the 64 core model has an obvious

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nonprothread ripper counterpart, so

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those will be easy to compare to. But 16

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and 12 core, well, those would be very

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interesting for folks who want Mondo RAM bandwidth and PCI Express lanes, but

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don't actually want a ton of cores. What

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else actually sets them apart, though? The most glaring difference is clock

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speeds. On the 32 and 64 core models,

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both base and boost clocks are lower on

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the Pro chips, but this kind of makes

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sense as it's likely to help them better conform to thermal limits and to help

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improve their stability. You're also not going to have certain features that you

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enjoy on regular Threadripper, like the ability to overclock the CPUs or the

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memory. As for the 12 and 16 core models, oddly these have really high

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base clocks, nearly 4 GHz on both of them, which is actually higher than

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their Zen 3 gaming equivalents. So, they

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might pack a hefty punch for certain applications. But unfortunately, we

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don't have them on hand because we can't just go buy one to pop in here and see

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how it goes. Speaking of which, I mean, how proprietary is this thing? Got a

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little Skeatic there. Oh, that's interesting. 1 2 7 and eight. Is this 8

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channel memory?

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Oo. Wait. So that means with only four

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DIMs installed, we're not even taking advantage of it all. Gosh darn it. Oh,

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wow. It tips real easy. Oh, interesting. That's because it's using a very

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proprietary VL looking power supply. So

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this is a 12vt only power supply meaning that any conversion to five or 3.3 volt

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is actually done on the motherboard rather than on the power supply which

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means that this motherboard is also going to be very proprietary though.

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That would explain the uh cooler that it's got right here with these 12vt

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connectors going. Wait, where do they run to?

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Hello. Oh, these Oh, okay. These are for

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graphics cards. So, the graphics card auxiliary power comes from the side of

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the motherboard there. And then, no way. Oh, that's trippy. There's a handle here

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for the power supply that goes into like a solid almost looks like a PCI Express

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8X slot or something connector on the board. Huh. It's amazing how much

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engineering, you know, the OEM system integrators do for like to reinvent

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standards that mostly kind of exist.

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Good for

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you. What else we got here? We got uh one, two, three, four, five. Got lots of

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PCI Express expansion. All of these 16x

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slots are like fully pinned out. I mean, that makes sense because there's 128 PCI

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Express lanes on this thing. Cooling is a little funny on this thing. There's

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all this ventilation room at the front. like it's completely open, but there's

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only a single 92mm fan in there when it looks like they could easily have a 120

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or even a 140. And then the back is just a single 92mm fan. Again, this is like

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this RTX 6000 Quadro graphics card and a

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32 core CPU. You'd think they'd put a little bit more air flow in it. Oh,

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that's fun. When's the last time you saw a RAM cooler? Surface level weirdness

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aside, there's actually some deeper weirdness to talk about in here. While

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it looks the same as a normal Threadripper, you know, get your CPU and your

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motherboard and all that, underneath that trippy cooler is an allnew platform

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called WRX80 with a new socket in it

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that's called SWRX8. Now, there's not a ton of

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information out there about it because we aren't getting any retail motherboards with this platform and this

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socket, but we do know some key differences from the launch event, which

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include most of Threadripper Pro's selling points. So, we're talking 128

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lanes of PCI Express Gen 4 connectivity, eight channel memory with a max capacity

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of two terabytes, up from quad channel with 256 gigs of max capacity, support

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for registered ECC memory, which might help us explain the coolers on the uh

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RAM sticks there, full memory encryption, and AMD Pro management. So,

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on the surface, it seems like this is just a slightly modified epic CPU on a

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server board, but with extra steps. But

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if you look closely, AMD server boards

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don't have a chipset because Epic is

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technically an

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SOC. This board does have a chipset.

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That's how it has support for workstation features like AMD's RAID

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configurator. Epic has no such thing.

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Weirdness aside, we can still make some educated guesses as to how this system

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will behave. And overall, I'm expecting gaming performance to of course be worse

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with Threadripper Pro definitely having the upper hand in anything that requires

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lots and lots of memory capacity and bandwidth. Remember, if you fully kit

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out a 64 core 3990X with 256 gigs of

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RAM, that leaves you with only 2 gigs of RAM per thread. Pretty measly figure for

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some professional and commercial applications, but let's try it out for

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real. Drag race time. One, two, three,

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go. Threadripper versus Threadripper

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Pro. Big showdown.

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Yeah. And in a big surprise to

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absolutely nobody when you've got architecturally basically the same

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bloody thing. Um, but like one of them is clocked better. One of them will give

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be slightly faster. Yeah, now we know.

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Hey, thanks Linus Tech Tips. Wait. Oh,

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damn it. I forgot to tell it to run ah only one time.

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45,400 41,800. Of course, Cinebench is not the

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beall and endall of CPU performance. So, we've taken the liberty of running a few

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more benchmarks to demonstrate that yes, in fact, water is wet and the sky is

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blue. But what about pricing? Because these CPUs are only available from

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Lenovo in a pre-built form, we don't

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really have like an MSRP for them, leaving us to go off of the pricing on

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Lenovo's website, which is frankly

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terrifying. The price difference between the 12 core and the 64 core is nearly

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$15,000. Holy shikes. But then there's

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like the multi,000 discounts or whatever. So, we just have no idea. As

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for the exclusivity, we don't know specifically what AMD's intentions. It

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really is weird how companies can be cy about the strangest things, isn't it?

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Um, but we can at least make some educated guesses. First off, when

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launching a product aimed at professionals, the understanding is that

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many of the aforementioned professionals don't want to or don't have the time to

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spec and build custom machines. They're probably ordering in bulk, likely

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through their IT department. That means that focusing on an OEM like Dell, HP,

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or Lenovo could actually make sense since the people that AMD expects to

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actually buy these CPUs likely don't have much interest in retail chips. It

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can also lower the overall development cost and the time frame of releasing a

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product significantly if you limit the scope of compatibility. AMD clearly knew

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that Zen 3 was coming when they started this project. So, if you only have one

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system model available at launch, that means you only have to optimize one BIOS

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and you only have to work with one company during development. If you were

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working with a whackload of retail board partners, like they do for something

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like Ryzen, that could easily delay something like this by weeks or even

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months, by which time there might not be any point launching it at all. It can

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also help save on distribution and marketing costs because they would be

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shared with your OEM partner, which in this case would be Lenovo. The

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unfortunate side effect of this is that we have much more limited variety as

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consumers or proumers. Fewer motherboard

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manufacturers means less choice if you want cool features like IPMI for remote

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management, Thunderbolt for high-speed connectivity, etc., etc., at least for

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now. As for what I think, well, I'm kind

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of pissed off because I just bought a

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bunch of new regular Thread Rippers for our video editors and now they're going

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to be obsolete. So, thanks AMD. But I'm

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also grateful because thanks to AMD building cool shizz all the time, CPUs

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actually get obsolete again instead of just being re-released with the same

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re-imagined technology over and over again.

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So, thanks AMD. But that's why I never reuse my

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certainly got the IO for