AMD's preposterous Threadripper Pro price tag holds its 128-thread monster back from greatness

pcgamer.com:

AMD's Threadripper processors have been drifting away from the clutches of the humble enthusiast for years now, but for those without a corporate credit card the latest Ryzen Threadripper 5000-series chips are now wholly out of reach. If you want to get your hands on one of AMD's new and impressively mighty Threadripper Pro CPUs today, you could end up forking out up to $6,499 for the privilege.

Our pals over at Tom's Hardware(opens in new tab) have received the SEPs for three new Threadripper Pro chips, which are as follows:

These chips were announced back in March and are only available within majorly expensive corpo workstation builds from Lenovo and Dell. They will be sold separately for DIY builders, however, but that won't happen until «later this year,» so says AMD.

There are also two other chips, the 5955X and 5945X, which will assumedly be cheaper as these chips' core counts are a little more pedestrian at 16 and 12—a match for some processors in the desktop Ryzen 5000-series range. However, pricing has not yet been confirmed for these two.

Most impressive of the lot is the 5995WX, which comes with 64 cores and 128 threads of the current generation Zen 3 architecture. That makes for a mean combination of high throughput and genuinely high clock speeds, at 4.5GHz boost across the lineup. That's genuinely great for a processor with so many cores.

If that wasn't already a tantalising mix, AMD brings 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 4, 8-channel memory, and 256MB of L3 cache. That's, uh, quite a lot, even though it is technically a lot less per core than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The WRX80 platform these chips slot into even offers CPU and memory overclocking.

For $6,499, however, this chip needs to deliver in absolutely every way.