 AMD announced Threadripper Pro, their competitor for Intel Xeon W designed for workstations back in July of 2020. And it's taken us all the way until now to actually get our hands on one. And it's still not available to the broader market. So there is no way for you to just go and buy one of these at your local store. Just kidding. AMD announced retail Threadripper Pro while we were editing this video. They are expected to be available in March. But dry those tears because we haven't even told you if you should want one yet. To find out, we'll be taking the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 for a little test drive. Yes, my friends, this configuration right here has a sticker price of over $18,000. But then there's a nearly $8,000 discount, which is like, what is even happening here? I don't know what's going on. I need a sponsor. Honey is the free to use browser extension that helps you find some of the best promo codes on over 30,000 sites. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. I mean, you never know when you might miss out on an $8,000 discount. It's really unusual for AMD to restrict access to their products. I mean, even the fanciest epic server CPUs are readily available on newegg.com. But these red ripper pros launched exclusively alongside Lenovo's new ThinkStation P620 workstation with no publicly disclosed length to the term of exclusivity and no apparent intention from AMD to sell these chips in anything other than OEM systems at all. Before we get to talk about why they're exclusive though, let's talk about the CPUs for a bit. When AMD launched first gen Ryzen and Threadripper, they were finally reentering the CPU market in a big way. On desktop, they had everything from budget quad cores all the way up to 16 core monsters that targeted enthusiasts. And they followed their desktop reentry up with Epic, which by its second generation was spanking Intel in the server and data center market. With Threadripper Pro then, they're finally coming back to the last major computing market, workstation. And that's for the first time since AMD Opteron was a thing. Back in those days though, the distinction between a desktop and a workstation was a lot more clear. If you wanted lots of RAM, ECC RAM, many CPU cores, which usually required multiple CPUs on a single board, or if you needed lots of PCI express expansion, workstation was sort of your only option. Since then though, regular Threadrippers, like our test bench right here, along with Ryzen's semi-universal support for unregistered ECC memory, and for that matter, the way that Intel's HDDT chips moved to very high core counts and more PCI express lanes to counter AMD's threat, mean that the line has blurred a lot, especially considering that relatively speaking, the cost of these CPUs is not actually that exorbitant from a certain point of view. So why would AMD launch this Threadripper Pro based on their soon to be replaced Zen 2 architecture? The lineup consists of four models, a 64 core, a 32 core, and yes, that is correct, both 16 and 12 core models. Our unit here is equipped with the 3975WX, a 32 core with a 3.5 gigahertz base clock and 4.2 gigahertz boost. Now it, along with the 64 core model, has an obvious non-Pro Threadripper counterpart. So those will be easy to compare to, but 16 and 12 core? Well, those would be very interesting for folks who want Mondo RAM bandwidth and PCI express lanes, but don't actually want a ton of cores. What else actually sets them apart though? The most glaring difference is clock speeds. On the 32 and 64 core models, both base and boost clocks are lower on the Pro chips, but this kind of makes sense as it's likely to help them better conform to thermal limits and to help improve their stability. You're also not going to have certain features that you enjoy on regular Threadripper, like the ability to overclock the CPUs or the memory. As for the 12 and 16 core models, oddly these have really high base clocks, nearly 4 gigahertz on both of them, which is actually higher than their Zen 3 gaming equivalents. So they might pack a hefty punch for certain applications, but unfortunately we don't have them on hand because we can't just go buy one to pop in here and see how it goes. Speaking of which, I mean, how proprietary is this thing? Got a little schematic there. Oh, that's interesting. One, two, seven, eight. Is this eight channel memory? Ooh. Wait, so that means with only four DIMMs installed, we're not even taking advantage of it all. Gosh darn it. Oh wow, tips real easy. Oh, interesting. That's because it's using a very proprietary-ville looking power supply. So this is a 12 volt only power supply, meaning that any conversion to five or 3.3 volt is actually done on the motherboard rather than on the power supply, which means that this motherboard is also gonna be very proprietary though. That would explain the cooler that it's got right here with these 12 volt connectors going... Wait, where do they run to? Hello? Oh, these 12... Oh, okay. These are for graphics cards. So the graphics card auxiliary power comes from the side of the motherboard there and then... No way. Oh, that's trippy. There's a handle here for the power supply that goes into like a solid, almost looks like a PCI Express 8X slot or something connector on the board. Huh. It's amazing how much engineering, the OEM system integrators do for like to reinvent standards that mostly kind of exist. Good for you. Oh, what else we got here? We got some, two, three, four, five. Got lots of PCI Express expansion. All of these 16X slots are like fully pinned out. I mean, that makes sense because there's 128 PCI Express lanes on this thing. Cooling is a little funny on this thing. There's all this ventilation room at the front. Like it's completely open, but there's only a single 92 millimeter fan in there when it looks like they could easily have a 120 or even a 140. And then the back is just a single 92 millimeter fan again. But this is like, this is RTX 6000 Quadro graphics card and a 32 core CPU. You'd think they'd put a little bit more airflow in it. Oh, that's fun. When's the last time you saw a RAM cooler? Surface level weirdness aside, there's actually some deeper weirdness to talk about in here. While it looks the same as a normal thread ripper, you know, get your CPU and your motherboard and all that, underneath that trippy cooler is an all new platform called WRX 80 with a new socket in it that's called SWRX 8. Now there's not a ton of information out there about it because we aren't getting any retail motherboards with this platform in the socket, but we do know some key differences from the launch event, which include most of Threadripper Pro selling points. So we're talking 128 lanes of PCI Express Gen 4 connectivity, eight channel memory with a max capacity of two terabytes up from quad channel with 256 gigs of max capacity, support for registered ECC memory, which might help us explain the coolers on the RAM sticks there, full memory encryption and AMD Pro management. So on the surface, it seems like this is just a slightly modified Epic CPU on a server board, but with extra steps. But if you look closely here, AMD server boards don't have a chip set because Epic is technically an SOC. This board does have a chip set. That's how it has support for workstation features like AMD's RAID configurator. Epic has no such thing. Weirdness aside, we can still make some educated guesses as to how this system will behave. And overall, I'm expecting gaming performance to of course be worse with Threadripper Pro definitely having the upper hand in anything that requires lots and lots of memory capacity and bandwidth. Remember, if you fully kit out a 64 core 3,990X with 256 gigs of RAM, that leaves you with only two gigs of RAM per thread, pretty measly figure for some professional and commercial applications. But let's try it out for real. Drag race time. One, two, three, go! Threadripper versus Threadripper Pro. Big showdown. Yeah! And in a big surprise to absolutely nobody when you've got architecturally basically the same bloody thing, but like one of them is clocked better. One of them will be slightly faster. Yeah, now we know. Hey, thanks Linus Tech Tips. Wait, oh, damn it. I forgot to tell it to run. Ah, only one time. 45,400, 41,800. Of course, Cinebench is not the be all and end all of CPU performance. So we've taken the liberty of running a few more benchmarks to demonstrate that yes, in fact, water is wet and the sky is blue. But what about pricing? Because these CPUs are only available from Lenovo in a prebuilt form, we don't really have like an MSRP for them, leaving us to go off of the pricing on Lenovo's website, which is frankly terrifying. The price difference between the 12 core and the 64 core is nearly $15,000 US dollars. Holy shnikes. But then there's like the multi-thousand dollar discounts or whatever. So we just have no idea. As for the exclusivity, we don't know specifically what AMD's intention were. It really is weird how companies can be cagey about the strangest things, isn't it? But we can at least make some educated guesses. First off, when launching a product aimed at professionals, the understanding is that many of the aforementioned professionals don't want to or don't have the time to spec and build custom machine. They're probably ordering in bulk, likely through their IT department. That means that focusing on an OEM like Dell, HP, or Lenovo could actually make sense since the people that AMD expects to actually buy these CPUs likely don't have much interest in retail chips. It can also lower the overall development cost and the timeframe of releasing a product significantly if you limit the scope of compatibility. AMD clearly knew that Zen 3 was coming when they started this project. So if you only have one system model available at launch, that means you only have to optimize one BIOS and you only have to work with one company during development. If you were working with a whack load of retail board partners, like they do for something like Ryzen, that could easily delay something like this by weeks or even months, by which time there might not be any point launching it at all. It can also help save on distribution and marketing costs because they would be shared with your OEM partner, which in this case would be Lenovo. The unfortunate side effect of this is that we have much more limited variety as consumers or prosumers. Fewer motherboard manufacturers means less choice if you want cool features like IPMI for remote management, Thunderbolt for high speed connectivity, et cetera, et cetera, at least for now. As for what I think, well, I'm kind of pissed off because I just bought a bunch of new regular Threadrippers for our video editors and now they're gonna be obsolete. So thanks AMD, but I'm also grateful because thanks to AMD building cool shiz all the time, CPUs actually get obsolete again, instead of just being re-released with the same re-imagined technology over and over again. So thanks AMD, but that's why I never reuse my segues to sponsors like Drop. 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