Ahead of AMD’s expected announcement this week, leaks about the next-generation Threadripper Pro 7000 CPUs and the Storm Peak platform have surfaced, with what seems to be reliable information.
While the desktop Ryzen 7000 and 4th Gen EPYC HPC products have already received the Zen4 treatment, the high-end desktop (HEDT) has remained on the Zen3-based architecture served presently by the Threadripper Pro 5000 series. The switch to the more advanced architecture and newer 5nm TSMC manufacturing process should bring significant performance gains and previously unavailable IO options to the segment, including PCIe Gen5 and official DDR5 memory support, which should bring significant memory bandwidth improvements.
AMD hasn’t faced direct competition from Intel in this space for years, but that hasn’t slowed AMD’s advancements in the segment. In the leak, it was revealed that, for the first time, there would be a massive 96-core, range-topping Threadripper Pro 7995WX. This new high-end SKU comes with 96MB of Level 2 cache, a staggering 384MB of Level 3 cache, and an impressive 128 PCIe Gen5 lanes. While pricing wasn’t shared, it will certainly cost a fair amount of money, but make for a worthwhile investment for the target audience and segment.
Regarding the other CPUs in the lineup, it seems AMD will offer CPUs with as few as 12 cores, all the way up to the previous range-topping 64-core option in the Threadripper 7985WX, all of which feature 64 PCIe Gen5 lanes.
While the Zen4 architecture delivers sizeable performance gains on its own, it also appears AMD has increased the operating frequency throughout the range, with boost clocks reaching as high as 5.35GHz on most SKUs, except for the 7995WX, which has a boost clock of 5.15GHz. These clock speed increases are partly due to the newer 5nm process from TSMC, which has serviced all other Zen4-based products to date.
AMD has also increased the TDP (thermal design power) of the CPUs to 350W, up from the 280W of the current Threadripper 5000 series. A more than reasonable increase in TDP, considering the higher clock frequencies and increased core count for the 7995WX in particular.
All of this will be confirmed this week, but so far, AMD appears poised to introduce a new platform and CPU range that will likely go unmatched for quite a while. After the official launch, we will provide a comprehensive breakdown of the various SKUs and platform features.