AMD to end Threadripper Pro 5000 drought for non-Lenovo PCs A drought of AMD's latest Threadripper workstation processors is finally coming to an end for PC makers who faced shortages earlier this year all while Hong Kong giant Lenovo enjoyed an exclusive supply of the chips. AMD announced on Monday it will expand availability of its Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 CPUs to "leading" system …
The strategy is; if there is a shortage of chip manufacturing capacity, use what there is to make the most expensive chips. Favouring one manufacturer so they usually have stock, is better than a dozen who normally don't and will sell out of small batches immediately.
Intel aren't exactly competing in the many-thread desktop scene. 7 years ago it was a different story; with their 5000 series offering (for the time) large numbers of threads and lots of RAM support. The latter point was in fact why I took one of those systems on; because I needed $ludicrous RAM for finite element analysis.
AMD trumped those CPU's with their desktop offerings; and Intel more or less left the market not long afterwards. My home PC has been upgraded to an AMD 5950; while the work workstation is still trundling along happily. I could upgrade it, but honestly unless I can go much beyond 64GB RAM for reasonable cost there is no point as the workload has to swap to disk if model size goes > RAM. No amount of threads helps once the workload has to swap to disk. (And yes, I have filled a 4TB swap file before - tortuous to use... the sort of workload that occassionally warrants a really fat server)
There's blatantly an opportunity here for Intel to throw it's hat back in the ring, but with enough problems figuring out regular desktop offerings I can't see them trying to do a new product line to sit between Xeon and 12000 series desktop CPU.
The many-threaded CPU definitely has it's uses for workloads that can exploit it, and do not end up limited by other bottlenecks. I would suggest such workloads are usually pretty specialised and a more regular desktop setup is probably a better choice for many.
but Intel still needs a product that can operate in the same space for the specific few that need this architecture. What they have isn't what people that need all that IO are looking for.
And if you aren't going to give all that 128pcie+8channel RAM a workout, why even look at one?
I build a test sled for one of the earlier Threadrippers, and it lived up to the hype I/O wise, but for most workloads a middle of the road Ryzen build would still beat it up. Intel is still in the game for the high end desktop segment, but for the money, if you can use all those lanes, the threadripper is a compelling buy.
You could build something that works almost as well and is MUCH more expensive on an Intel setup, but I don't see people turning to that as a first choice. So AMD will probably get away with this for a while.
Not a fan of the hold-back personally, especially to a China based company, but there isn't likely to be any rush for the door because of this. The people working on the sorts of problems that can justify this kind of specialist hardware aren't making their decisions in the heat of passion. They can do the math, to say the least.
That said, AMD should be weary of the complacency of letting Intel play catch-up. Once they get moving again, and they will, they are going to charge aggressively and full speed.
Agreed. I planned on building a 3990 system for rendering, waited a year and a half looking for them in stock at non-2X scalper prices, and finally gave up and went back to Intel. Sorry AMD, you lost a customer for the next 5 years minimum. If you don't want to sell me your products, I'll go elsewhere.
> ...but those hoping to build a workstation on a budget may want to check out the latest high-end consumer CPUs from AMD and Intel instead.
The news is a shame, but TBH if you are building to a "budget", you are almost certainly not thinking of building a Threadripper system.
Even the cheapest Threadrippers are pretty dear compared to a comparable Ryzen desktop CPU.
Mind you, looking on AliExpress, I see that you can pick up a 2950X for CAD $601. Probably a second hand CPU but at least it is sub $1000 and gives you 32-threads.
I think the author's intent in using the term "budget" was clear. Literally, any amount of money is a budget if we have reserved money for something, but it is often used to refer to a lack of significant funds.
Threadripper, while cool, is still a fairly niche product. There are very few applications in the real world that benefit from such a large number of cores. Rendering is the obvious one. If you are running a lot of VMs then that is the other assuming that I/O or memory bandwidth doesn't become your limiting factor.
I think I'm going to give up on the idea of upgrading my box before I retire, save for component upgrades and add-ons; maybe an upgrade to a 16 core processor from the 12-core I have now (certainly not with the current "supply chain issues" gouging going on, though.)
Realistically, I'm 7-12 years from retirement. I can make this box last that long; it is only a year old, and was considered "bleeding edge" at the time (save for a modest GPU.) I just can't see choking down what AMD now wants for a decent developer box with those useless gaming-focused crippled chips and the overpriced Pro lines. There is no middle ground that I can see where my needs fit.
What on earth are you talking about? There are no supply chain issues with AMD or Intel Desktop CPU's any more and there hasnt been for months. The top end 16 core 5950X is currently selling for £260 less than its RRP (£489 when I picked one up from Scan 6 weeks ago and still the same price today). The reason TR Pro 59XX is not available till next month is because Lenovo demanded a period of exclusivity in exchange for developing their TR Pro workstation line
>I just can't see choking down what AMD now wants for a decent developer box with those useless gaming-focused crippled chips
Again, WTF? In what way is the 5950X a "useless gaming-focused crippled chip"? AMD has only a single product that is purely gaming focused, the 5800X3D and the 12 and 16 core 5900/5950X make excellent content creation and developer workstations on the cheap. They even support ECC UDIMMS. A 5950X is faster than a 24 core non Pro Threadripper 3960X for almost all software development and build tasks thanks to its 25% faster per thread performance. It even matches the 32 core non Pro 3970X in most build tasks. The number of situations where a software build can utilise 64 concurrent threads is almost zero, there are too many dependencies in most build chains
We build embedded linux systems, custom OS's for 3rd party embedded and IoT systems, that vary in size and complexity from ARM set top boxes (buildroot/yocto) to VR walls (custom debian where we have to build all packages from source to integrate our customisation and own software). From a day to day developer perspective I have a choice of my 64 core non Pro TR 3990X or my 5950X. The 5950X is preferred most of the time because its silent and the day to day and single thread performance is better. The only time the 3990X comes into play is when we do automated build testing. That means iterating through tens of different build configs for 4 different base systems across 4 cpu architectures (x86-64, armhf, arm64, risc-v) totalling 350-450 builds in total. At that point those 64 cores, 2x memory capacity and ~60% better memory bandwidth start to make sense when you are running 16 VM's in parallel. Thats a ~28 hour job on the 5950X dropping to ~17 hours on the 64 core Threadripper
Either way its a weekend job and dependent on disk IO as much as CPU performance. If you really have a build chain at the very top of the complexity and size ladder then you are probably going to get a bigger performance improvement from upgrading you build storage to an Optane P5800X or even an older 905P than adding more cores
These are specialized tools, that only really fit a minority of the workstation market. So it makes sense that AMD is reducing the part footprint to just the ones that are making them the most money, and are designed to run full tilt. They are staying with the part of the market that Intel can touch right now.
Everyone else can, and probably should, just buy a non-threadripper. Like you point out, there are rock solid options, they run cooler, take up less space, and spare a little of the pain in the wallet. Threadripper build take a good bit of careful planning, and one or two cheap parts can bottleneck the whole build. So you wind up having to push all sorts of things up to a higher price point so see the benefits of it.
The build I did had a SAS card to a tier of SSDs, plus a pair of nvme drives, and a matched set of very low CAS clocked RAM. Ethernet cards with offload. The only thing that wasn't "ouch, my wallet" tier were the gpu's which were only very expensive. That said it hauled @$$. It also played Crysis(once), and for a brief moment was the fastest single GPU Threadripper build on 3dMark. That said a machine half it's price with a proper gaming GPU would still run circles around it for most stuff.
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