AMD Announces The Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 WX Series For What Should Be Great On Linux

[Teggs]

I can well imagine people wanting to drop these into WRX80 motherboards... but they can't because only Lenovo gets supply. Come on, AMD.

Also, I wonder if these have the fuse that Lenovo blows to ruin the resale value of the chip.

[coder]

No price list in sight. From AMD's perspective, that's got to be one of the great things about a partner-only launch.

[coder]

Seems weird to announce ZEN 3 Threadrippers on the practical eve of ZEN 4 coming out. Why not just wait and release ZEN 4 threadrippers?

Intel traditionally had about 1-year+ skew between the launch of desktop CPUs and HEDT/workstation/server CPUs with the same cores. To compensate, they would number the consumer HEDT CPUs as if they were part of the same series as the next generation of desktop CPUs.

Still, you're right that AMD waited longer on this than probably anyone (including AMD) reasonably expected. They had no push factor (i.e. competition from Intel, in the workstation market) and there were negative pull-factors, in the sense that Epyc/Milan has been in extremely high-demand, while supply was restricted, translating in Zen3 dies being scarce.

Ultimately, it could be the launch of Apple's new M1 Ultra that got these new CPUs finally out the door!

[scottishduck]

You can be certain that the addition of “pro” means a huge price hike

[coder]

You can be certain that the addition of “pro” means a huge price hike

Yeah, but not simply because of the branding. In this case, there are meaningful differences. The Threadripper Pro CPUs are basically full-fledged EPYC, whereas the non-Pro have only half the memory channels, half the PCIe lanes, and are missing some other features.

Here's a comparison of the TR 3000 vs TR 3000 Pro:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16805...r-threadripper

They show that, for some applications, the Pro features either aren't necessary or worth the price difference. So, it really depends on what you're doing.

[hubick]

I wonder if these have the fuse that Lenovo blows to ruin the resale value of the chip.

Yes, apparently Lenovo is the only one getting these at this time, and the chips ARE fused to the system. I'm typing this on my 3960X system, and I'd never dream of buying this crap. So sad. Hopefully there's a new DIY TR release at some point.

[coder]

Hopefully there's a new DIY TR release at some point.

They did eventually release TR 3000 Pro to the public. Lenovo's exclusivity was only for a period of time.

I guess AMD thinks it has to do this sort of nonsense, in order to court big workstation OEMs away from Intel.