As anticipated, AMD’s newest Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX should smash all existing CPU performance records.
With Zen 4, AMD officially introduced its eagerly awaited Threadripper portfolio, bringing for the first time 96 cores and 192 threads to the workstation market. Our sister site PCMag put the flagship CPU through its paces (remotely) in a number of well-known benchmarks to commemorate the much-anticipated introduction. As predicted, the top-dog Threadripper Pro CPU destroyed the opposition, showing that, like its 64-core, 128-thread predecessor, it will fulfil the prophecy of being the fastest workstation CPU ever.
For our PCMag colleagues to test the 96-core 7995WX, the top-of-the-line Threadripper Pro CPU, Dell supplied a remote link. Although testing it yourself is more enjoyable, Dell said that the remote link barely reduces performance by 1-3%. This 350W CPU is put in a Dell Precision 7875 workstation with two RTX 6000 Nvidia workstation cards. It is identical to every Threadripper Pro Zen 4 component. It was put to the test against two workstations equipped with the quickest components from the most recent generation. One of them is an HP Z8 Fury workstation with a 56-core Xeon w9-3495X CPU, which is the quickest workstation SKU currently offered by Intel. Using a Lenovo PC, the 64-core Threadripper Pro 5995WX Zen 3 CPU from the previous generation was also included for comparison. One significant difference between the three machines was that the Zen 4 model featured 512GB of memory while its rivals only had 128GB.
The Threadripper Pro launched with a score of over 100,000 in Cinebench multi-core, which was nearly twice as quick as the opposition. A monster CPU like this can really shine in the Cinebench test because its performance is known to scale closely with the amount of cores and threads it can use, and it did so. It was able to destroy the performance of the Xeon chip and outperform the previous Threadripper Processor by 55%. Except from how far ahead of the competition this CPU is already, there are no surprises here.
Even though the render timings were substantially faster, the Threadripper Pro system was more than twice as fast as the competitors in a rendering test using Blender. For instance, rendering the test on the Dell workstation only took 22 seconds whereas doing so on the Xeon-based system took 50 seconds. Again, the 64-core Threadripper machine took twice as long (43 seconds), demonstrating a significant generation-to-generation improvement made possible by faster clocks, greater TDP, and improved architectural design.
As usual, not all tests run exclusively on the CPU, so other components of the system may be used depending on the workload, but Zen 4 Threadripper is off to a strong start thus far. Although we haven’t yet seen HEDT customers using it on a test bench, it appears that it will eventually overtake workstation customers as the platform of choice. But, AMD is focusing exclusively on cores and cache this time, giving it a significant advantage over Intel’s W-series. We’ll see more head-to-head benchmark confrontations in the upcoming weeks, and Chipzilla is probably not going to enjoy it.