The situation with AMD’s HEDT CPUs, under the trade name of Threadripper, is paradoxical to say the least, since it is the only line of processors from Lisa Su’s company that has not made the jump to Zen 3. La raison ? ? The lack of competition from Intel, which will only return to this market in the third quarter of 2022 with its Xeon Workstations, the version designed for workstations instead of the servers of its Sapphire Rapids architecture.
At the same time, AMD’s presentation of Zen 3D Cores with V-Cache by Lisa Su suggested that Zen 3-based Threadripper had been canceled to evolve them to a version with the vertical cache inside. Well it looks like Lisa Su didn’t take them off the roadmap and we might see them at the end, which would be great news for the desktop market.
Their release date is expected in the next few weeks, and AMD could talk about it, slightly during their CES event on January 4th.
This is the AMD Threadripper 5000 “Chagali” range
A leaked internal memorandum confirmed the existence of AMD’s line of HEDT processors with Zen 3 cores also used in the Ryzen 5000 desktop processors and the EPYC Milan 7003 for servers.
The Threadripper 5000 “Chagali” range will consist in total of five different processors, which are as follows:
- At the top of the chain and as the most powerful processor, we have the 5995WX (100-00000444) with 64 cores.
- The second and third processors have 4 CCDs each. the 5975WX (100-00000445) has 32 active cores, while the cropped version is the 5965WX (100-00000446) with 24 cores.
- Finally we have the versions with 2 CCDs, on the one hand, the 5955WX (100-00000447) with 16 cores and on the other the 5945WX (100-00000448) with 12.
The Boost clock speed of all variants is 4550 MHz, while the base speed varies, being 2700 MHz in the case of the 5995WX, but much higher in the rest of the range. Starting with the 3600 MHz 5975WX, 3800 MHz for the 5965WX and ending with 4000 and 4100 MHz of the 5955WX and 5945WX respectively. They all use the SWRX8 socket which allows them a TDP up to 280W and with the possibility of placing of Threadripper per board.
Finally they will not have a V-Cache
Surprisingly, according to the data leaks from the Threadripper 5000 “Chagali”, the amount of third-level cache memory is surprising, rumors were about last minute integration of V-Cache, however, it was not like that and as you can see the amount of this cache per CCD is the same as that of a Zen 3 standard.
The reason? We cannot forget that a workstation is not the same as a server where they are designed to run every day of the week and at all times. The concept of Boost speeds is not common on a server, but on a workstation. The problem with adding a chip vertically above the main chip is that it causes the temperature to rise which makes it impossible to achieve high clock speeds.
In other words, processors stacked in memory gain performance over one clock cycle, however, they cannot achieve such high speeds. Placing AMD’s V-Cache on the Threadripper would have reduced their clock speed and reduced their potential advantage. AMD should present them at CES 2022 with other novelties, where it has already warned: we will not let go.
