Lately there have been a lot of AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO CPU models leaking, and this already seems more of an intention than a fluke. It would not be strange for the manufacturer himself to be the one to reel off information by dropper because, as you know, to gain notoriety it is important that people talk about you (for better or for worse).
The new Threadripper PRO from AMD, with up to 64 cores
The two chips that have been leaked this time have the suffix “WX” at the end of their name, which means that they are part of the family of AMD processors intended for workstations. In principle, both processors are based on the Zen 3 architecture, and in fact the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX model will theoretically be the flagship processor for the AMD HEDT category in this generation.
This chip incorporates no less than 64 physical cores and 128 processing threads thanks to AMD’s SMT technology, and theoretically it would have up to 256 MB of L3 cache. We are facing a processor designed for workstations, as we have said before, so we can expect it to have 128 PCI-Express 4.0 lanes and support for up to 2 TB of RAM, yes, still DDR4 and not DDR5. Its TDP will be around 280W according to the recent leak from GIGABYTE, and that means that it will take a very advanced cooling system to keep this processor at a decent operating temperature.
The other model that has been leaked is the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5945WX, a variant much less powerful compared to the previous one, incorporating “only” 12 physical cores and 24 processing threads. We are facing a processor made up of a 4 + 1 chiplet design instead of the 8 + 1 design that we have seen in Threadripper models with 32 cores or more, which means that, for AMD, this CPU is much cheaper to manufacture and therefore its price should also be much lower.
As for the rest of the specifications of this CPU, it would be in line with the last generation Threadripper PRO, and more specifically with the 3945WX model that would be the one to be replaced in the AMD range. Therefore, we would be talking about 64 MB of L3 cache, 128 PCI-Express 4.0 lanes and a TDP that, despite its few cores, would also be in the order of 280 watts.
In terms of performance, sadly the only metric that has been leaked is for the Threadripper PRO 5945WX, which gets 5.56 GFLOPS per core (in contrast to 5.39 GFLOPS per core for the 3970X). The performance per core therefore seems to have been updated although this improvement seems rather poor for the new Zen 3 architecture.
In any case, we must bear in mind that at the moment we are talking about CPUs that are surely Engineering samples, and that means that they are almost certainly not configured with the operating speed that commercial models will have, so the performance they deliver right now is significantly lower than what they will deliver when they are launched on the market.
So by the time these CPUs are released we can expect higher operating speeds, as well as native support for faster RAM and a more streamlined design that further improves performance and truly separates the architectures. Zen 3 and Zen 2 in empirical terms.
In theory AMD will launch the first HEDT models towards the end of the year (rumors point to November), but these workstation models are not expected until the first half of 2022. In any case, we are simply basing ourselves on rumors and there are no information confirmed by AMD, so none of these data is definitive.
