Intel’s Sapphire Rapids Xeon W (codenamed Fishhawk Falls) processors aren’t the only core-heavy products in the HEDT market for a long time. Tony Yu (opens in new tab)General Manager of Asus China (via) HXL (opens in new tab)) has confirmed that AMD’s rival Ryzen Threadripper 7000 (codenamed Storm Peak) and Spanking’s new TR5 platform will hit the market in the second half of this year. Powered by the latest Zen 4 cores, the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 is definitely on our list of the best CPUs for workstations.
AMD’s consumer (Ryzen 7000), mobile (Ryzen 7045 and Ryzen 7040) and server (EPYC 9004) lineups have all received Zen 4 upgrades. So it’s fair for AMD to give the rest of its Ryzen Threadripper parts the same treatment. AMD will use a combination of TSMC’s 5nm and 6nm process nodes for the core computing die (CCD) and I/O die (IOD) respectively in its chiplet-designed Zen 4 processors. The Ryzen Threadripper 700 is unlikely to deviate from this formula. A hot topic is whether AMD will limit his Ryzen Threadripper 7000 to 64 cores or match it with the EPYC 9004 (codenamed Genoa) maximum core count.
Ryzen Threadripper has always been a mirror image of AMD’s EPYC processors in terms of core count. Of course, AMD doesn’t want Ryzen Threadripper to cannibalize its more expensive EPYC counterpart, so the feature set is different.At Genoa, AMD pushed the server’s Zen 4 chips to up to 96 cores. That’s 50% more than his previous EPYC 9003 (Milan) processor. So far, we’ve only seen evidence of 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 7000 chips, so it remains a mystery whether HEDT users will get the full Zen 4 package.
| processor | SPEC Workstation 3.1 | V Ray 5.02 | blender 3.4.0 monster | Blender 3.4.0 Junk Shop | Blender 3.4.0 Classroom | Cinebench R23 Single Core | Cinebench R23 Multicore | CPU-Z single thread | CPU-Z multithreading | Cinebench R23 Power Draw |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX | 10.12 | 62,065 | 614.55 | 387.77 | 301.31 | 1,496 | 73,779 | 618.8 | 33,957 | 435W |
| Xeon w9-3495X | 9.22 | 59,440 | 512.88 | 356.64 | 264.24 | 1,736 | 73,066 | 705.6 | 30,836 | 680W |
| Xeon w7-2495X | 5.97 | 29,740 | 277.82 | 176.18 | 136.32 | 1,779 | 37,809 | 720.8 | 16,478 | 310W |
As a quick introduction, AMD’s current Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX features 64 Zen 4 cores while the Xeon w9-3495X features 56 Golden Cove cores. As a result, the former was primarily faster than the latter in benchmarks provided by Asus. The Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX also showed superior power efficiency compared to its peers. This result looks unfavorable for Intel’s Xeon w9-3495X, so even a 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 7000 processor should be enough to blow Xeon chips out of the water. It may not need to be pushed, but many HEDT consumers will love it.
AMD introduced Socket SP5 (LGA6096) specifically for the EPYC 9004. Logically, the new platform would accompany AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 7000 lineup. So AMD pushes his Socket sTRX4 (Socket SP3r3) and Socket sWRX8 (Socket SP3r4) to nursing homes. Yu alluded to the new platform as “TR5”. Just as Socket SP3 and Socket sTRX4 share the same number of contacts (4,0946), Socket SP5 and future he TR5 share the same number.
According to previous leaks, AMD could launch Ryzen Threadripper 7000 in HEDT and Workstation flavors. His regular HEDT chip is reported to support 4 channel memory, 64 PCIe 5.0 lanes, 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes and overclocking. However, the workstation chip, presumably the Pro variant, appears to employ 8 channel memory, 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes and 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes, but lacks processor and overclocking support.
In the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 WX (Chagall) series, the chip maker has ended HEDT chips as AMD has ruled out non-Pro versions. AMD’s roadmap has Ryzen Threadripper powered by Zen 4, but the chipmaker hasn’t specified if it plans to release non-Pro and Pro versions.
Yu is confident that the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 will be released in the second half of this year, with whispers around hardware circles ostensibly pointing to a September launch. If the date is accurate, it could officially appear at Computex 2023.
