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"However, it should be noted that these processors will only be available as part of pre-built systems, and no corresponding consumer motherboards will be made

"However, it should be noted that these processors will only be available as part of pre-built systems, and no corresponding consumer motherboards will be made available." I'm pretty disappointed in this, but I suppose the market for such workstations leans more towards "large enterprise that needs reliability" than "hobbyist that needs low cost/likes to customize their rig."

varispeed 6y ago
It doesn't sound like it is mutually exclusive. However restricting access to technology by AMD looks bad.
- smolder 6y ago
  It doesn't really look bad to me... market segmentation isn't all about the silicon but the support and quality assurance. It seems like they want maximum control over quality for the big-spending money-making customers, which makes a lot of sense. What I'm surprised about is that they're branding this "Threadripper Pro" instead of branding it as a high end Epyc workstation chip. Threadripper is a watered down Epyc chip to start with, and all they've done here is raise base clocks, lower boost, and turn on the additional IO that Epyc already had which was disabled in TR.
  - kinghajj 6y ago
    My guess would be that they don't want to provide the same level of support/warranties for using these Threadripper Pro chips as mission-critical servers. Probably the expected lifetime is shorter due to increased voltage/thermals as a result of the higher clock frequencies.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      That's pretty fascinating take (and I never thought of it as a possibility). Are you saying that these chips might last only like 2-3 years and one day just burn off on boot, even if cooled the best way possible?
013a 6y ago
These are absolutely just low-bin EPYC chips. EPYC has never had "consumer-available" motherboards (read: you can buy them, just have to know where to look), nor have some of the chips been officially validated for Windows 10 (read: it works fine). But the 2TB of 8-channel memory and 128 PCI-E lanes screams EPYC. Unclear what the price differential will be, but consumers can buy EPYC chips just fine, so if you want something home-built, that's a path. The main issue is finding a good motherboard; going Xeon-at-home is pretty straightforward, but EPYC boards tend to be really basic server-grade stuff designed for a datacenter.

varispeed 6y ago

It doesn't sound like it is mutually exclusive. However restricting access to technology by AMD looks bad.

smolder 6y ago
It doesn't really look bad to me... market segmentation isn't all about the silicon but the support and quality assurance. It seems like they want maximum control over quality for the big-spending money-making customers, which makes a lot of sense. What I'm surprised about is that they're branding this "Threadripper Pro" instead of branding it as a high end Epyc workstation chip. Threadripper is a watered down Epyc chip to start with, and all they've done here is raise base clocks, lower boost, and turn on the additional IO that Epyc already had which was disabled in TR.
- kinghajj 6y ago
  My guess would be that they don't want to provide the same level of support/warranties for using these Threadripper Pro chips as mission-critical servers. Probably the expected lifetime is shorter due to increased voltage/thermals as a result of the higher clock frequencies.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    That's pretty fascinating take (and I never thought of it as a possibility). Are you saying that these chips might last only like 2-3 years and one day just burn off on boot, even if cooled the best way possible?

013a 6y ago

These are absolutely just low-bin EPYC chips. EPYC has never had "consumer-available" motherboards (read: you can buy them, just have to know where to look), nor have some of the chips been officially validated for Windows 10 (read: it works fine). But the 2TB of 8-channel memory and 128 PCI-E lanes screams EPYC. Unclear what the price differential will be, but consumers can buy EPYC chips just fine, so if you want something home-built, that's a path. The main issue is finding a good motherboard; going Xeon-at-home is pretty straightforward, but EPYC boards tend to be really basic server-grade stuff designed for a datacenter.