AMD’s New Threadripper CPUs Have Up to 96 Zen 5 Cores

Threadripper CPUs are not worth putting on a gaming PC most of the time, but if you have a particular use case that can really benefit from having a lot of cores and threads, this is probably the CPU to get. AMD has just refreshed its Threadripper range with the new Threadripper 9000 and Threadripper Pro 9000 series.

AMD has just launched the Threadripper 9000 and Threadripper 9000 Pro range, successors to the Threadripper 7000 range, and it’s looking as good as it ever looks. The regular Threadripper series is HEDT CPUs, meant for prosumers and enthusiasts who don’t mind splurging a ton of money on a CPU, and they’re great for tasks like high-end gaming and streaming simultaneously, advanced video editing, 3D rendering, and complex content creation. The Threadripper Pro series is a bit more business-y, meant for workstations and professional applications, and prioritizing stuff such as reliability, stability, extensive I/O, and improved memory capacity. These new chips follow those tenets pretty closely.

For what it’s worth, both ranges come with Zen 5 cores, and a lot of cores at that. The regular Threadripper series goes up to 64 cores and 128 threads, while the workstation-first Threadripper Pro comes with a bonkers 96 cores and 192 threads. The Threadripper range’s standout feature has typically been insane core counts, hence the Threadripper name—it has lots of threads, which makes these chips especially good at swifting through multi-core computing tasks that benefit from that amount of cores.

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The cores, individually, are not as good as those on AMD consumer chips—this is a given since if you try to run all of these cores at the frequencies you’d run a desktop chip, you might just burn your house down. The Threadripper 9980X, with 64 cores, runs at a 3.2 GHz base speed and boosts up to 5.4 GHz, while the Threadripper Pro 9995WX keeps the same boost speed but brings its base speed even lower to 2.5 GHz. By contrast, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, a regular desktop chip with 16 cores, has a base clock of 4.3 GHz and boosts up to 5.7 GHz. The cores aren’t too bright by themselves, but with a lot of them, they rip through most multithreaded tasks. Threadripper. Get it?

Both the Threadripper 9000 and the Threadripper Pro 9000 feature support for up to 128 PCI Express 5 lanes and the same sTR5 socket, though you might still not be able to fit a Pro chip on a regular consumer sTR5 motherboard because of BIOS restrictions. It also supports up to octo-channel ECC RAM up to DDR5-6400. The chips have a 350W TDP, which means you’ll need a seriously powerful cooler to cool them down.

We don’t have pricing or availability details just yet, but these chips are always in the range of $1,000 to $10,000 depending on how many cores you need and whether you need a regular or a Pro chip. They are prohibitively expensive for most people, but they fill a very specific niche—you should stick to Ryzen chips for most regular-purpose PCs. It’s still a fascinating lineup nonetheless.

Source: AMD