AMD officially unveiled its long-anticipated Threadripper lineup for Zen 4, bringing 96 cores and 192 threads to the workstation market for the first time. To celebrate the much-hyped launch, our sister site PCMag put the flagship CPU through its paces (remotely) in several popular benchmarks. As expected, the top-dog Threadripper Pro CPU shredded the competition, indicating it would fulfill the prophecy of being the fastest workstation CPU ever, just like its 64-core, 128-thread predecessor.
Dell provided a remote link for our colleagues at PCMag to test the flagship CPU in the Threadripper Pro line; the 96-core 7995WX. Though this isn't as fun as testing it first-hand, Dell said the remote link only drops performance by 1-3%. This is a 350W CPU—just like every Threadripper Pro Zen 4 part—installed in a Dell Precision 7875 workstation with two RTX 6000 Nvidia workstation cards. For comparison, it was tested against two workstations with the fastest current-generation parts. Those include an HP Z8 Fury workstation with a 56-core Xeon w9-3495X CPU, Intel's fastest current workstation SKU. The previous generation 64-core Threadripper Pro 5995WX Zen 3 chip was also added for comparison via a Lenovo PC. One big disparity between the three machines was the Zen 4 machine was outfitted with 512GB of memory, while its competition had just 128GB each.
Right off the bat in Cinebench multi-core, the Threadripper Pro laid down a score of over 100,000, which was almost twice as fast as the competition. Cinebench performance is known to scale precisely with the number of cores and threads it can use, so it's a test where a monster chip like this can truly shine, and shine it did. It was able to stomp all over the Xeon chip's score, and it also improved upon the previous Threadripper CPU's score by 55%. There are no surprises here besides how far out in front of the competition this CPU is already.
Turning to a rendering test like Blender, the Threadripper Pro system was more than twice as fast as the competition, even though the render times were much quicker. For example, it took the Dell workstation just 22 seconds to render the test, while the Xeon-based system required 50 seconds. Once again, the 64-core Threadripper system took twice as long at 43 seconds, showing sizable generation-to-generation improvement thanks to increased TDP, higher clocks, and architectural improvements.
As always, not every test runs purely on the CPU, so other parts of the system will come into play depending on the workload, but so far, Zen 4 Threadripper is off to an impressive start. It seems like it will become the dominant platform for workstation and HEDT customers, though we have yet to see the latter on the test bench. Still, AMD is going all-in on cores and cache this time around, which gives it a sizable advantage over Intel's W-series on paper. We're sure in the coming weeks we'll get to see more head-to-head benchmark battles, and it likely will not be pretty for Chipzilla.
Tagged In
AMD CPUsMore from Computing
