If you longed for the power of Threadripper Pro, but didn’t want to buy a ThinkStation, you’re in luck: starting in March, AMD will begin selling CPUs directly to consumers, ending Lenovo’s exclusive access to the processor line.
While Threadripper vanilla appears to be the peak computing power for many (myself included), there are certain benefits that the Pro line offers that would be seriously beneficial to those who need them:
- Memory channels are doubled, from four to eight
- PCI-E lanes are duplicated, from 64 to 128
- The memory capacity has been expanded from 256 GB to 2 TB (!!!)
To summarize these huge numbers in a more real-world image, Threadripper Pro allows users to work with larger data sets due to its expanded memory capacity. It also allows double the expansion for users who need tons of graphics or network cards.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors will now be available directly to consumers from March 2021!
With up to 64 cores, 128 PCIe 4.0 tracks and 8 memory channels, Threadripper PRO is the world’s fastest workstation processor: https://t.co/MKtJBTJT0A pic.twitter.com/cj1SorEKUY
– AMD Ryzen (@AMDRyzen) January 12, 2021
Of course, all these features mean nothing without motherboards that can support them – after all, what good would 128 PCI-E lanes do if the motherboard had only 4 PCI-E 16x slots? This one AnandTech The article points to three motherboards that should support processors, but we are not likely to see the same variety and choice that we see with consumer motherboards.
There is no price information yet, but normal Threadripper CPUs aren’t exactly cheap. Still, if you need the resources of this type of CPU, you are probably making some money from it (hence the nickname “pro”), and these chips offer some features, such as 64 threads and PCI-E gen 4, for the workstation. work users that Intel simply does not provide outside of its server products.