- Inside this absolute monster of a computer
is AMD's Threadripper PRO 5995WX.
It packs a redonkulas 64 cores, 128 threads,
and a quarter gigabyte of L3 cache.
It runs at a whopping 2.7 gigahertz base,
and turbos up to 4.5 gigahertz.
Just look at it!
It uses the same Zen 3 cores
as AMD's Ryzen 5000 consumer chips,
just four times as many of them,
making it absolutely riptastically fast.
Hello, new fastest CPU.
What the actual hell is this?
But what would you pay
for the privilege of owning the fastest CPU in the world?
AMD figures it's a lot,
so much that instead of representing it in dollars,
'cause the number is far too high,
we're gonna put it this way.
The 5995WX costs 4.6 3090 Ti's,
or 13 Xbox series X's, 15 iPhone SE's,
or 216 high-quality, insulated,
circuit board water bottles from lttstore.com.
And the wildest part,
they're not totally out to lunch on their pricing.
I mean, don't get me wrong,
I don't like it,
but this CPU came out five months ago,
and I'm only getting one now,
which means that someone is buying them all.
Let's talk about who, and why?
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- The most obvious reason to shell out
for a Threadripper PRO 5000 is performance.
We compared it to AMD's own EPYC Milan 7763,
which also is 64 Zen 3 cores,
and representing high end consumer CPUs,
we included Intel's Core i9 12900K.
And if it doesn't dunk all over both of them,
AMD is gonna end up pretty embarrassed here.
A quick note about our testing,
we don't have some of these very expensive EPYC chips
to test ourselves,
so we've got Wendell over at Level1Techs
to grab some results for us.
Shout out Wendell,
this video wouldn't have been possible without him,
so subscribe, like his videos, buy his merch,
the team over there is amazing.
Anyway, benchmark time.
In Cinebench, while single core performance
is nothing to write home about compared with the 12900K,
the multi-threaded performance is ridiculous.
And compared to the EPYC 7763,
our Threadripper PRO shows a 10% improvement
on single core performance,
with a 16% uplift in multi-threaded performance.
And AMD continues to flex those rippling,
bulging, rendering muscles.
I mean, look at this Blender render.
It's competitive with an RTX 3090,
when we're talking raw compute.
I repeat this CPU competes with a GPU.
Now obviously once you start using things
like Optix to render, that's no longer true,
but the idea of a CPU even approaching a high-end GPU
in rendering performance is nuts.
And while the improvements
over the EPYC 7763 don't seem that huge at first,
when we zoom in and just compare the Zen 3 CPUs,
that 20% improvement in gooseberry becomes much clearer.
But we don't need to zoom in at all
to see the massive 7zip performance uplift.
Look at how this thing absolutely wipes the floor
with its Zen 3 server sibling.
And the 12900K?
It's lucky to even show up on the graph.
For context, the 5995WX puts out more MIPS
than some dual socket EPYC configurations.
The decompression rate on this thing is confounding.
Literally, we looked at other outlets results
and we don't really know why our results are so high,
but clearly Threadripper PRO is making the most
of Zen 3's improved memory controller.
That's the extent of our EPYC data.
Thanks again, Wendell.
The rest of our results will just involve the 12900K
and the new Threadripper.
In our Mozilla compile,
well, things don't really improve compared to the 12900K,
only shortening the compile by a minute.
Clearly, this compile doesn't take advantage
of all the threads we have available,
but you'd think, in creative workloads,
this thing should slay, right?
Paired with two GPUs and a Threadripper,
this workstation should make easy work
of the Adobe Suite PugetBench tests,
which unfortunately actually ended up quite underwhelming.
In all three programs,
this $18,000 workstation actually performed worse
than a 12900K and a 3090.
And this is a great example
of how not all workloads are necessarily gonna benefit
from just throwing more money at the problem.
Looking closely at our results
for PugetBench for Premier Pro, we can see
that Intel just destroys when working on h.264 files,
thanks to their Quick Sync, which boosts performance,
but then pretty much everywhere else,
the Threadripper comes out ahead.
However,
when we replace the included dual GPUs with an RTX 3090,
we see our behemoth pull ahead.
The reason?
Well, despite having two GPUs in the system,
when you're editing,
Adobe Premier only uses a single GPU
with the second relegated to rendering only.
So the more powerful single 3090
with its NVENC encoder provides our Threadripper PRO
with more opportunities to stretch its 64 legs.
Wait a second.
Yeah, it's faster than a 12900K,
but it's not 10 times faster.
How does this make any sense?
How does anybody buy this?
Okay.
No one sets pricing for their product in a vacuum.
So the first thing you do
is try to understand your customer.
And since you know
that nobody is gonna put one of these
in a freaking bang for the buck gaming PC,
because that would be stupid and unnecessary,
AMD can rationalize this pricing
by observing that, well,
workstation customers are already used to spending 10,
20, even $30,000 on a single machine.
I mean this one sent over by Supermicro,
big, thanks, by the way guys,
Supermicro is the only reason
we're even able to cover this thing,
'cause AMD didn't send one, is worth about US$18,000.
And only about a third of that is the CPU itself.
It also packs closed-loop water cooling,
256 gigabytes
of 3,200 mega transfer per second ECC DDR4 memory,
three terabytes
of high performance Kioxia Gen 4 NVMe SSDs in RAID 0,
and two AMD, how does this come off?
I'm sure it comes out somehow.
Two AMD Radeon PRO W6800 workstation GPUs.
I mean the things an absolute freaking tank.
So it kind of makes sense that it would be priced like one.
The second thing that you do then
is you scope out the competition.
I mean, odds are someone else is gonna be gunning
for a piece of your customer's wallet,
especially if the wallet is 10, 20, $30,000 big,
except that in the workstation PC space
that competition has all but dried up.
Apple couldn't even be arched to update the Mac Pro
from its 2019 era Xeon W's.
And if they had,
Intel's closest competitor to Threadripper PRO,
which came out about a year ago,
tops out at a mere 38 cores and costs a whopping US$4,500.
So this utter lack of other viable options
gives AMD effectively carte blanche
to charge whatever they want.
But I can hear you thinking,
"Hold on a second Linus, no it doesn't.
I could just buy 16 core Ryzen
or Core i9 chips for a fraction of the cost.
I mean, you just showed
that they're basically as fast for most things anyway."
Yeah, that's true enough
when the applications that you're focused on
are multimedia or gaming,
but look at the areas
where the Threadripper PRO is a lot faster.
It's professional applications,
rendering, simulations, financial calculations,
and in a professional setting, time is money.
It really is, think about it.
When the time of the engineer
who's sitting at that station
is worth, let's say, $50 an hour for the sake of argument.
If they spend just 10 minutes a day doing this,
sitting idle, waiting for a slow or an unstable machine,
it easily costs more than if you had just shelled out
for an absolute, beast spec,
top of the line system in the first place.
And that doesn't even factor in the quality
of life improvements for your staff
from having good computers
and the opportunity cost
of delaying whatever project that they've been working on.
You gotta spend money to make money, right?
Maybe if we'd given Kyle a Threadripper PRO,
we'd have our screwdriver launched by now.
Sign up for a notification, by the way.
The launch is coming very soon, lttstore.com.
If anything, I would say the price is kind of too low.
No, don't, hold on.
Let me explain.
AMD's announced retail price
for their top spec, 64 cores Zen 3 server CPU,
the EPYC 7773X is about US$8,800.
Now that CPU does have some benefits over this one.
It uses 3D V-Cache
to pack in a whopping 768 megabytes of cache.
And it's compatible with dual socket motherboards,
allowing data centers
to pack a whopping 128 cores in a single system.
But individually, in spite of all of that cache,
it's performance is actually lower
than the Threadripper PRO 5995WX.
That means that if AMD drops the price
of these workstation chips too much,
they would risk competing with their own EPYC lineup,
which they super do not want to do.
According to their latest earnings call,
EPYC has been largely responsible
for the 83% growth that they've seen
in workstation and server sales in Q2 2022.
This is exactly what happens
when a company has no competition.
There's no incentive to compete
if the only one you're competing with is yourself,
which also appears to be the reason
that enthusiast Threadripper, like the non-pro one,
got absolutely scrapped this generation.
Remember when AMD justified the socket change
from Threadripper 2000 to Threadripper 3000
by saying, well, we really just need the updated design
and more power for the extra cores?
Fair enough, we said.
And they promised to make it up to us
by ensuring that TRX40
wouldn't be a dead platform with zero upgrade path.
Well, I'm still waiting, AMD.
I know it's a champagne problem,
but it's very obvious that this was a business decision
rather than an engineering decision,
because the chips freaking exist.
Here's some guy in Taiwan benchmarking the 5990 non-WX.
Presumably it has some drawbacks,
like fewer PCIe lanes, lower system memory limit,
and no official support for ECC,
but it's clearly functioning well enough
to overclock the snot out of it and break world records.
Rant aside, by the way,
if you must over clock high spec chips,
thankfully, AMD offers that
on the workstation Threadripper PRO line up,
or do they?
AMD's website says
that the 5995WX is not unlocked for overclocking,
but then in a June blog post,
they state that it will support CPU and memory overclocking.
But the boards that are currently on the market
don't allow for it.
But then Dr. Ian Cutress received an ASRock board
that allowed him to crank the CPU to a TDP of 400 Watts.
So it seems like overclocking is on the table,
which means we might see some pretty wild benchmark results
out of this chip in the future,
especially, if it means
we can overcome the default boost behavior.
While AMD reports a 4.5 gigahertz maximum boost,
they are only talking about a single core,
which, on a 64 core chip, is kind of of like saying
that your car goes 350 miles an hour,
but only if like most of it is over here
and the wheel is rolling down the road.
You know what I mean?
So in our benchmarks, we noticed
that once we started running a load
on more than just one core,
our boost was limited to just 4 gigahertz
and then quickly declined to 3.1 as we loaded up more cores.
I can only imagine how fast
and how hot this thing will run
with every core pegged at 4.5 gigahertz.
For now though, we'll have to sit and wait,
maybe watch some exclusive
behind the scenes content on Floatplane to pass the time.
Now I know that you high-end desktop nerds
are chomping at the bit for something,
anything to fill the void
in this ever shrinking product segment
in between workstation and consumer desktop.
And I'm with you.
Usually, I'd love to have something like this in my rig
but it's just massive overkill and it costs way too much.
And frankly, it's a little late to the party.
I'm gonna do something I don't do that often.
I'm gonna say guys, just wait.
If the rumors are to be believed,
the generation of CPUs coming at the end of this year
from both AMD and from Intel
are gonna bring some massive improvements.
And since we still don't know
when this Threadripper PRO chip is gonna hit retail,
it might just be better to hang on
and see what the future holds.
Spoiler alert.
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If you enjoyed this video,
why not watch our video about the Comino GRANDO RM?
It's basically the Intel Nvidia equivalent to this beast.
And it's got some pretty interesting tricks
up its sleeve as well.