If you longed for the power of the Threadripper Pro, but did not want to buy a ThinkStation, you are in luck: from March, AMD will sell the CPUs directly to consumers, ending the exclusive access to Lenovo to the processor. line.
Although the vanilla Threadripper to many people (myself included) looks like the peak of computing power, there are certain benefits that the Pro line offers that will be very beneficial to those who need it:
- The memory channels are doubled, from four to eight
- PCI-E lanes are doubled, from 64 to 128
- Memory capacity is expanded from 256 GB to 2 TB (!!!)
To sum up the massive numbers in a more real picture, the Threadripper Pro allows users to work with larger data sets due to the extensive memory capability. It also allows the dual extension for users who need a lot of graphics or network cards.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors will now be directly available to consumers from March 2021!
Threadripper PRO offers up to 64 cores, 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes and 8 channels of memory and is the world’s fastest workstation processor: https://t.co/MKtJBTJT0A pic.twitter.com/cj1SorEKUY
– AMD Ryzen (@AMDRyzen) 12 January 2021
Of course, all these features mean nothing without motherboards that can support it. What is the point of 128 PCI-E lanes of course if the motherboard only had 4 PCI-E 16x slots? It AnandTech article points to three motherboards that should support the CPUs, but it is unlikely that we will see the same variety and choice as we do with motherboards for consumers.
There’s no word on pricing yet, but regular Threadripper CPUs are not exactly cheap. However, if you need the capability of this type of CPU, you probably make money (hence the ‘pro’ moniker), and these chips offer some features, such as 64 wires and PCI-E gen 4, to the workstation users that Intel simply does not deliver outside of its server products.