AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX Performance On Linux
Earlier this year AMD announced the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series but initially was limited to Lenovo workstations. Earlier this summer it was then announced the Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series would be heading to more system integrators and then the DIY market. Well, finally, these Zen 3 Threadripper chips are heading out to the DYI market and today the review embargo lifts. AMD recently sent over a Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX for my Linux testing at Phoronix and here is my initial review and performance benchmarks for this Zen 3 24-core / 48-thread HEDT chip.
I've already written in past articles on the Threadripper PRO 5000 WX-Series but the new line-up basically amounts to the Zen 3 refresh for Threadripper. But to some dismay it's only the more expensive Threadripper PRO SKUs and this DIY launch coming just a short time ahead of the highly anticipated Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" launch. The Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 series tops out still at up to 256MB for the L3 cache and a top boost frequency of 4.5GHz compared to 4.3GHz on the Threadripper PRO 3000 series. The other new features are common to Zen 3 like AMD Shadow Stack, the IPC increase, etc.
The Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX provided by AMD for review features 24 cores / 48 threads with up to a 4.5GHz boost frequency and a 3.8GHz base frequency. All of the Ryzen Threadripper PRO SKUs are rated for a 280 Watt TDP.
An AMD WRX80 motherboard is required for the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 series. The motherboard I used for testing was the ASUS Pro WS WRX80E‑Sage SE WIFI, which with a BIOS update is able to support the Threadripper PRO 5000 series. The motherboard arrived with the older BIOS and wouldn't boot the new 5965WX CPU but fortunately there is the ASUS USB BIOS "FlashBack" flash capability from USB drive that allowed flashing the motherboard without needing a PRO 3000 series CPU. Like the PRO 3000 series, the PRO 5000 chips support up to eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory. For this Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX test system with the ASUS Pro WS WRX80E‑Sage SE WIFI was 8 x 16GB Corsair DDR4-3200 memory.
For all of my initial testing was carried out on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with the Linux 5.19 kernel while keeping the other software components at their defaults. The other systems I re-tested for this review included:
- Core i9 10980XE
- Core i9 12900K
- Ryzen 9 5950X
- Threadripper 2950X
- Threadripper 2970WX
- Threadripper 2990WX
- Threadripper 3960X
- Threadripper 3990X
- Threadripper 3970X
- Threadripper PRO 5965WX
The comparison CPUs were based on what I had available: Unfortunately I was never seeded with any Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3000 series processors for review and thus why there isn't any comparison points there. Similarly, the 5965WX is the only Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 series processor I currently have. All of these processors were freshly (re)tested on this very latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS + Linux 5.19 stack.
A wide assortment of Linux benchmarks were carried out for this initial article while further follow-up articles are on the way looking at the Threadripper PRO 5965WX performance under other open-source/Linux areas as well as the memory channel scaling performance and other interesting performance tests.