- AMD announced Threadripper™ PRO their competitor for Intel Xeon W designed for workstations
back in July of 2020. And it's taken us all the way until now to actually get our hands on one. And it's still not available
to the broader market. So there is no way for you to just go and buy one of these at your local store. - [Announcer] Just kidding. AMD announced retail Threadripper™ PRO while we were editing this video. They are expected to be available in March - But dry those tears, because
we haven't even told you if you should want one yet. To find out we'll be taking
the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 for a little test drive. Yes, my friends, this
configuration right here has a sticker price of over $18,000. But then there's a nearly $8,000 discount which is like, whoa, what
is even happening here? I don't know what going on. I need a sponsor. Honey is the free to use browser extension that helps you find some
of the best promo codes on over 30,000 sites. Get it today www.joinhoney.com/ltt. I mean, you never know
when you might miss out on an $8,000 discount. (upbeat music playing) It's really unusual for
AMD to restrict access to their products. I mean, even the fanciest
Epyc Server CPU's are readily available on www.newegg.com but these Threadripper™
Pros launched exclusively alongside Lenovo's new
ThinkStation P6220 workstation with no publicly disclosed length to the term of exclusivity
and no apparent intention from AMD to sell these chips in anything other than OEM Systems at all. Before we get to talk about
why they're exclusive though, let's talk about the CPU's for a bit. When AMD launched first
gen Ryzen and Threadripper, they were finally re-entering
the CPU market in a big way. On desktop, they had everything
from budget quad-cores all the way up to 16 core
monsters that targeted enthusiasts and they followed their
desktop re-entry up with Epyc, which by its second generation was spanking Intel in the
server and data center market. With Threadripper™ Pro then,
they're finally coming back to the last major computing
market, workstation and that's for the first time
since AMD Opteron was a thing. Back in those days, though, the distinction between a
desktop and a workstation was a lot more clear. If you wanted lots of RAM,
ECC RAM, many CPU cores which usually required multiple
CPU's on a single board or if you needed lots of
PCI Express expansion, workstation was sort of your only option. Since then though regular Threadrippers, like our test bench right here, along with RYZEN's semi universal support for unregistered ECC memory, and for that matter, the
way that Intel's HEDT chips moved to very high core counts and more PCI Express lanes
to counter AMD's threat meaning that the line has blurred a lot especially considering
that relatively speaking, the cost of these CPU's is
not actually that exorbitant from a certain point of view. So why would AMD launch
this Threadripper™ Pro based on their soon to be
replaced Zen 2 Architecture. The lineup consists of four
models, a 64 core, a 32 core and yes, that is correct
both 16 and 12 core models. Our unit here is equipped
with the 3975WX, a 32 core with a 3.5 gigahertz base
clock and 4.2 gigahertz boost. Now it's along with the 64 core model has an obvious non-pro
Threadripper counterpart. So those will be easy to compare to, but 16 and 12 core. Well, those would be very interesting for folks who want Mondo RAM bandwidth and PCI express lanes, but don't actually want a ton of cores. What else actually sets them apart though? The most glaring
difference is clock speeds. On the 32 and 64 core models, both base and boost clocks
are lower on the pro chips, but this kind of makes sense as it's likely to help them better conform to thermal limits and to
help improve their stability. You're also not going
to have certain features that you enjoy on regular Threadripper like the ability to overclock
the CPU's or the memory. As for the 12 and 16 core models, oddly, these have really high base clocks nearly four gigahertz on both of them which is actually higher than their Zen 3 gaming equivalents. So, they might pack a hefty
punch for certain applications but unfortunately we
don't have them on hand because we can't just go
buy one to pop in here and see how it goes. Speaking of which, I mean,
how proprietary is this thing? Got a little schematic there. Oh, that's interesting,
one, two, seven, eight. Is this eight channel memory? - [Jake] Correct. - Whoa. Wait, so that means with
only four dims installed we're not even taking advantage of it all. Gosh, darn it. Oh, wow tips really zip. Oh, interesting. That's because it's
using a very proprietary vile looking power supply. So this is a 12 volt only power supply, meaning that any conversion
to five or a 3.3 volt is actually done on the motherboard rather than on the power supply which means that this motherboard is also gonna be very proprietary though. That would explain the cooler
that it's got right here with these 12 volt connectors going, wait, where do they run to? Hello? Oh, these. Oh, okay, these are for graphics cards. So the graphics card auxiliary power comes from the side of
the motherboard there and then, oh, no way. Oh, that's trippy. There's a handle here for the power supply that goes into like a solid, almost looks like a PCI
Express 8X slot or something connector on the board. Huh? It's amazing how much
engineering, you know, the OEM System integrators do for like to reinvent standards
that mostly kind of exist. Good for you. (laughing) Oh, what else we got here? We got one, two, three, four, five. Thought lots of PCI Express expansion. All of these 69 slots are
like fully pinned out. I mean, that makes sense because there's 128 PCI
Express lanes on this thing. Cooling is a little funny on this thing. There's all this ventilation
room at the front like it's completely open but there's only a single
92 millimeter fan in there when it looks like they could easily have a 120 or even a 140. And then the back is just a
single 92 millimeter fan again. Like this is RTX 6,000
Quadro graphics card and a 32 core CPU. You'd think they'd put a
little bit more airflow in it. Oh, that's fun. When's the last time you saw a RAM cooler. Surface level weirdness aside, there's actually some deeper weirdness to talk about in here. While it looks the same
as a normal Threadripper, you don't get your CPU in
your motherboard and all that, underneath that trippy cooler is an all new platform called
WRX80 with a new socket in it that's called SWRX8. Now, there's not a ton of
information out there about it because we aren't getting
any retail motherboards with this platform in the socket. But we do know some key
differences from the launch event which include most of
Threadripper™ PRO selling points. So we're talking 128 lanes of PCI Express gen four connectivity, eight channel memory with a
max capacity of two terabytes up from quad channel with
256 gigs of max capacity, support for registered ECC memory which might help us explain the coolers on the RAM sticks there. Full memory encryption
and AMD Pro management. So on the surface, it seems like this is just
a slightly modified Epyc CPU on a server board, but with extra steps. But if you look closely, AMD server boards don't have a chip set because
Epyc is technically an SOC. This board does have a chip set. That's how it has support
for workstation features like AMD's Raid configurator. Epyc has no such thing. Weirdness aside, we can still
make some educated guesses as to how the system will behave. And overall, I'm expecting
gaming performance to of course be worse with Threadripper™ PRO
definitely having the upper hand in anything that requires lots and lots of memory capacity and bandwidth. Remember if you fully
kit out a 64 core 3990X with 256 gigs of RAM, that leaves you with only
two gigs of RAM per thread, pretty measly figure for some professional and commercial applications, but let's try it for real. Drag race time one, two, three, go. Threadripper™ versus Threadripper™ PRO big show down, yeah. I didn't big surprise to absolutely nobody when you've got architecturally, basically the same bloody thing but like one of them is clocked better. One of them will give you slightly faster. Yeah. Now we know. Hey, thanks Linus Tech Tips Wait, oh dammit, I
forgot to tell it to run. Ah, only one time. 45,400, 41,800 Of course, Cinebench is
not the be all and end all of CPU performance. So we've taken the liberty of
running a few more benchmarks to demonstrate that yes
in fact water is wet and the sky is blue. But what about pricing? Because these CPU's are
only available from Lenovo in a pre-built form, we don't really have
like an MSRP for them. Leaving us to go off of with
the pricing on Lenovo's website which is frankly terrifying. The price difference between
the 12 core and the 64 core is nearly 15,000 US dollars. Holy schnikes. But then there's, like the
multi thousand dollars discounts or whatever, so we just have no idea. As for the exclusivity, we don't know specifically
what AMD's intention. It really is weird how
companies can be cagey about the strangest things, isn't it? But we can at least make
some educated guesses. First off, when launching a
product aimed at professionals the understanding is that many of the aforementioned professionals don't want to or don't have the time to spec and build custom machine. They're probably ordering in bulk likely through their IT department. That means that focusing
on an OEM like Dell, HP or Lenovo could actually make sense since the people that AMD expects to actually buy these CPU's, likely don't have much
interest in retail chips. It can also lower the
overall development cost and the timeframe of releasing
a product significantly if you limit the scope of compatibility. AMD clearly knew that Zen 3 was coming when they started this project. So if you only have one system
model available at launch, that means you only have
to optimize one BIOS and you only have to work with one company during development. If you were working with a whack load of retail board partners, like they do for something like Ryzen, that could easily delay
something like this by weeks or even months, by which time there might not be any
point launching it at all. It can also help save on
distribution and marketing costs because they would be
shared with you OEM partner which in this case would be Lenovo. The unfortunate side effect of this is that we have much more limited variety as consumers or prosumers. Fewer motherboard
manufacturers means less choice if you want cool features like IPMI for remote management, Thunderbolt for high-speed
connectivity, et cetera et cetera at least for now. As for what I think, well, I'm kind of off
because I just bought a bunch of new regular
Threadrippers for our video editors and now they're gonna be obsolete. So, thanks AMD. But I'm also grateful because thanks to AMD building
cool shiz all the time, CPU's actually get obsolete again instead of just being re-released with the same re-imagined
technology over and over again. - [Jake] And over and over - So, thanks AMD. But that's why I never reused my segues to sponsors like DROP. DROP and Disney have
collaborated to create the first ever officially
Disney licensed artisan Keycap. That's right. You can choose from Thor's Mjölnir, Thor's Mjölnir paired with
Captain America's shield or even Ironman's Neto Gauntlet as worn by Tony Stark himself. Each Keycap is meticulously hand painted by artisans in New Zealand
and beautifully cast in resin. They're compatible with both
CHERRY MX switches and clones and orders are only limited to 1000 units. So pre-order your very
own Infinity Saga Keycap from www.drop.com at the
link in the video description they are going to sell so many of those. Yeah, go check out our a
hundred gigabit networking if you're into this kind of like super crazy workstation stuff. We actually featured the system there. Certainly got the,
certainly got the IO for it.
