Video Games Tutorials and News - Amd Just Proved They're Not Your Friend - Threadripper Pro 5000 Announcement
Intro
that didn't take long. AMD's Red Ripper lineup revitalized the high-end enthusiast desktop space when it first dropped, and now, after a few short years, it no longer exists. That's right and AMD just announced their new Zen 3 based Threadripper Pro chips yesterday, and they look great, but note the pro.
These bad boys aren't going to be on store shelves near you. They're OEM only and they aren't going to be cheap. That's right, now that they're on top, it seems like AMD is resting on their laurels just like Intel did, and this announcement demonstrates once again that AMD is not your friend. You know who is, though.
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Here we go, Linus is ranting about evil corporations again, but hear me out, AMD's. They also come with increasingly enterprise-focused features like more memory capacity and channels, more PCI Expresslanes, and a bigger price tag, which is great.
What amd didn't announce - and why
I love it , but I have one question about the cheaper non-pro threadrippers. What's that there aren't any? Well then, what happened to socket strix4? It's dead like X399 after only one generation. That is such a shame. Now look, AMD is a publicly traded company, and that means that they are actually legally obligated to do whatever they can to increase profits for their shareholders.
If they didn't do it, they could be sued by their shareholders. So when faced with the prospect of using those Zen 3 chiplets to power lower cost consumer or enthusiast Threadripper processors compared to jacking up the price for Threadripper Pro and just not selling consumer chips anymore, you got ta bet that they're going to choose Red Ripper Pro.
After all, you gotta remember who it was that introduced the concept of a thousand dollar consumer CPU when they were on top back in the 2000s. Here's a hint: It wasn't Intel. Yes, they make good products and yes, they've been an underdog for a long time, but when AMD can take advantage of their top dog position, they will just like Intel.
Why bother with threadripper at all then?
So why did they make Threadripper in the first place then? If you ask me, mindshare, the OG thread rippers, the 1000 series, if you believe the story, weren't even on AMD's roadmap and launching them supposedly provided AMD with just another piece of their product stack to put even more Zen chips and machines worldwide.
Meanwhile, the slapping team blew into yet another one of their traditional strongholds, the high-end desktop market.
What killed hedt?
There's , just one problem with that in today's world, and that's where this conversation takes a bit of a weird turn. The high-end desktop concept for enthusiasts is currently obsolete.
Think about it. Intel hasn't released an HTT platform since mid-2017 and they haven't released a chip for one since late 2019, which coincidentally is around the time that the last consumer Threadripper chip was announced. So, what happened? For the 16-core Ryza 9 3950x, also launched in late 2019, for the first time you were able to get truly high core counts of 6.
16, of course, on a desktop platform. Remember the first-gen Threadrippers? The 1000 series actually capped out at 16 cores, so we had a desktop platform with pcie Gen 4 for massive bandwidth and was dropping at a time when late generation ddr4 modules with higher capacities were rolling off the production lines.
So, overnight, both Intel's x299 and AMD's threadripper platforms became significantly less appealing to most users because their major selling points were now being cannibalized by the consumer desktop platform. The last consumer threadripper chips that came out in early 2020 tried to stay relevant with up to 64 cores, 256 gigs of RAM, and 88 total PCI Express Gen 4 lanes, but how many people made use of all of that but then didn't need much more memory capacity?
How many prosumers were really building their own threadripper rigs versus buying pre-built system systems with enterprise features and support that's? The question AMD apparently asked themselves and the answer seems to have been very few and, honestly speaking, I don't like that HTT is basically dead.
Why hedt no longer makes sense
I hate it. But, I get it. Maybe what AMD is really doing here is creating a product lineup that better reflects what their customers are actually buying, and it's kind of a smart move as consumer platforms start rolling out with PCI Express gen 5.
The need for additional lanes is going to be seriously reduced. There's even talk already of reducing SSDS to just two lanes once Gen 5 hits the data center because the bandwidth is already there and it makes no sense to tie up the extra lanes and the associated pins and design complexity that come with them.
And while it's not quite the same thing as quad channel memory. DD5's double burst length with two sub-channels per module effectively means that memory transfers get similar latency benefits and, quite frankly, at the risk of being quoted out of context because I'm all about more power, well, 16 cores ought to be enough for anybody today.
If you don't find that comforting, maybe pick up a scarf from LTTStore. Unlike Threadrippers, they are not discontinued, and I know that kind of thing might upset you as an enthusiast, but think about it. What workloads need 16 cores right now? We're in the middle of a software design paradigm shift, like when we went from single to dual to dual to quad core, and it took and is taking a while for developers to figure out the best way to utilize these extra cores, and quad core turned out to be enough as recently as five years ago, because well.
Damn it, Intel said it was enough and also because utilizing those extra cores really is a struggle, going all the way to 16 even. Power users are having a hard time imagining how to fully utilize them. It's true, I've got a 12-core 3900x at home, and honestly, I don't use all those cores most of the time.
If I didn't dabble with running multiple virtual machines, I'd be just as well off with an 8-core or even a 6-core CPU, especially if all I wanted to do was game. In fact, six cores is what I went with for my VR rig. Sure, there's stuff like compiling code and non-gpu rendering, but the reality is that anybody's serious enough about coding or graphics to be looking at a Threadripper would probably also be looking at a separate build or render box so their workstation isn't unusable while the job's being done.
