The situation of AMD’s HEDT CPUs, under the trade name of Threadripper, is paradoxical to say the least, since it is the only range of processors from Lisa Su’s company that have not made the leap to Zen 3. The reason? ? The lack of competition from Intel that will not return to that market until the third quarter of 2022 with its Xeon Workstations, the cut version for workstations instead of servers of its Sapphire Rapids architecture.
At the same time, AMD’s presentation of the Zen 3D cores with V-Cache by Lisa Su suggested that Threadripper based on Zen 3 had been canceled to make them evolve to a version with the vertical cache inside. Well, it appears that Lisa Su has not removed them from the roadmap and we could see them at the end, which would be good news for the workstation market.
Their release date is expected in the next few weeks, and AMD could talk about them, lightly at their event at CES on January 4.
This is the range AMD Threadripper 5000 «Chagali»
A leak of an internal memorandum has confirmed the existence of AMD’s range of HEDT processors with Zen 3 cores also used in the Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs and the EPYC Milan 7003 for servers.
The Threadripper 5000 «Chagali» range will consist of a total of five different processors, which are the following:
- At the top of the chain and as the most powerful processor we have the 5995WX (100-000000444) with 64 cores.
- The second and third processors have 4 CCDs each. The 5975WX (100-000000445) has 32 active cores, while the trimmed version is the 5965WX (100-000000446) with 24 cores.
- To finish we have the versions with 2 CCD, on the one hand, the 5955WX (100-000000447) with 16 cores and on the other the 5945WX (100-000000448) with 12.
The Boost clock speed of all variants is 4,550 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 3,600 MHz 5975WX, 3800 MHz for the 5965WX and ending with 4,000 and 4,100 MHz of the 5955WX and 5945WX respectively. They all make use of the socket SWRX8 that allows them a TDP up to 280W and with the ability to place two Threadripper per plate.
Finally they won’t have V-Cache
From the leaked data of the Threadripper 5000 «Chagali» what is surprising is the amount of third level cache memory, the rumors spoke of the integration at the last minute of the V-Cache, however, it has not been 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 work every day of the week and at all hours. The concept of Boost speeds is not common on a server, but on a workstation. The problem with adding a chip vertically on top of the main one is that this causes an increase in temperature that makes it impossible to reach high clock speeds.
In other words, memory-stacked processors gain performance compared to a clock cycle, however, they cannot reach such high speeds. Placing AMD’s V-Cache on the Threadripper would have slashed their clock speed and reduced their potential advantage. AMD is expected to present them at CES 2022 along with other novelties, where it has already warned: we will not take our foot off the gas.
