Threadripper is no more!

I hate to agree with Linus, but I've been telling people the same thing for years. AMD isn't your friend. They are a business first and foremost. AMD released Threadripper and went after the HEDT market because it saw a business opportunity as Intel was vulnerable in that space. A good showing there would further benefit AMD in breaking into the OEM workstation market, which is where the real money lies in that segment. Of course, this was evident by the pricing of the Threadripper 3000 series. Go back even further when AMD had the performance crown with it's FX series. AMD charged $1,000 for a gaming CPU just as Intel did. In spite of previous behavior many people still wanted to pretend that AMD is still the same plucky little underdog fighting the good fight against Intel.

It isn't and it never was.
 
Many indications were heading this way. I’m not surprised. Trx4 dead after one socket. AMD, Intel would like to have a word with you in the hall…

But at the end of the day, it makes sense. Intel hasn’t released a HEDT socket since q4 of 2017. Just consider that. If there was enough demand, we’d have seen some more love for it. The desktop CPU’s caught up and DDR5 bandwidth helps.
 
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I was someone who ran HEDT exclusively since the beginning. I've had Threadripper, X299, etc. Honestly, there isn't a need anymore. I can get everything I need out of my current setup since SLI is dead. I needed multiple NIC's, but having the bandwidth for that and lots of storage isn't restricted to HEDT anymore.
 
Dan_D said:
In spite of previous behavior many people still wanted to pretend that AMD is still the same plucky little underdog fighting the good fight against Intel.
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I agree with what you said, and especially the last sentence. They are both companies looking to make a profit where they can.
 
Dan_D said:
I hate to agree with Linus, but I've been telling people the same thing for years. AMD isn't your friend. They are a business first and foremost. AMD released Threadripper and went after the HEDT market because it saw a business opportunity as Intel was vulnerable in that space. A good showing there would further benefit AMD in breaking into the OEM workstation market, which is where the real money lies in that segment. Of course, this was evident by the pricing of the Threadripper 3000 series. Go back even further when AMD had the performance crown with it's FX series. AMD charged $1,000 for a gaming CPU just as Intel did. In spite of previous behavior many people still wanted to pretend that AMD is still the same plucky little underdog fighting the good fight against Intel.

It isn't and it never was.
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Well said Dan. I don't understand business, but I see what you are saying.
 
Dan_D said:
I hate to agree with Linus, but I've been telling people the same thing for years. AMD isn't your friend. They are a business first and foremost. AMD released Threadripper and went after the HEDT market because it saw a business opportunity as Intel was vulnerable in that space. A good showing there would further benefit AMD in breaking into the OEM workstation market, which is where the real money lies in that segment. Of course, this was evident by the pricing of the Threadripper 3000 series. Go back even further when AMD had the performance crown with it's FX series. AMD charged $1,000 for a gaming CPU just as Intel did. In spite of previous behavior many people still wanted to pretend that AMD is still the same plucky little underdog fighting the good fight against Intel.

It isn't and it never was.
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Agreed. I've been saying the same thing for years. AMD is publicly owned. It has to make money for shareholders. AMD will charge as much as they can for goods to meet these ends. They only care for your money.

I've never understood the dogmatic theology of some tech industry fans.
 
I am not sure about the opposition here, company that only care for your money tend to be your very best friend, the issue tend to be when they do stop to care about your money (like AMD for the small money of the HEDT market versus in a world where they must choose what to cut).

I think a lot of people would love company that just want to work hard to get the most money out of them has possible, that a perfectly healthy relationship where a company does all they can to satisfy your need the best as possible making something you value enough to the point you are ready to pay for it, that Netflix.

For many it is much better than alternative, say company that want your attention to sell the ability to change your action to someone else, or drove by ego/prestige of the owners or what else that can possibly exist to motivate the production of good/service outside than just wanting your money.

I.E. That exactly what we want, ask and people are fan of company that want their money the most, usually, that Apple/Nintendo strength, wanting their fans money and why they love them.
 
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DooKey said:
Agreed. I've been saying the same thing for years. AMD is publicly owned. It has to make money for shareholders. AMD will charge as much as they can for goods to meet these ends. They only care for your money.

I've never understood the dogmatic theology of some tech industry fans.
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You mean tech companies aren’t my friend and aren’t doing me favors?
 
I've always suspected AMD was a shit company and now Linus proved it.
 
ZodaEX said:
I've always suspected AMD was a shit company and now Linus proved it.
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I wouldn't go that far.

AMD is no worse than any other company. The people who actually want to buy Threadripper represent a very small percentage of the market. It's a business decision which may be inconvenient for some. It's a for profit company that has a duty to its shareholders. Keep in mind, Intel hasn't released an HEDT CPU or platform in YEARS. It's last CPU offering for the HEDT market was in 2019. Intel is literally doing the same thing.

Both companies effectively cannibalized the HEDT market by racing to add cores in the mainstream segment and eventually, PCIe lanes. HEDT makes sense for fewer people than it ever has.
 
Unless you need quad channel RAM HEDT is dead for most users including myself (X99 platform still daily driver).
 
pendragon1 said:
youngins might not realize it though, they were in diapers when that chip came out :) that was the first "consumer" chip to break $1k wasnt it?
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Depends on how you look at it. Intel announced the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition about a week ahead of the Athlon 64 and FX CPU launch. It was priced at $999.99, in 1,000 unit quantities. It's street price was slightly higher.
 
Dan_D said:
Depends on how you look at it. Intel announced the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition about a week ahead of the Athlon 64 and FX CPU launch. It was priced at $999.99, in 1,000 unit quantities. It's street price was slightly higher.
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I remember waiting just long enough until AMD cut the price of the Athlon dual core from 1000 to 620 bucks and then I pulled the trigger. I then spent the next two years messing with CPU affinity just to get anything to run lol.
 
OFaceSIG said:
I remember waiting just long enough until AMD cut the price of the Athlon dual core from 1000 to 620 bucks and then I pulled the trigger. I then spent the next two years messing with CPU affinity just to get anything to run lol.
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I had run dual processor rigs before that, so it was something I was used to. I had a dual processor Opteron 254 rig at the time.
 
Dan_D said:
I had run dual processor rigs before that, so it was something I was used to. I had a dual processor Opteron 254 rig at the time.
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I had a workstation with dual socket motherboard back then, though it was only populated with a single CPU.

Unlike in the PCIe 2.0 or 3.0 days, the switch to PCIe 5 without being able to to quad SLI or Quadfire for AMD means the only use cases for for all those lanes would be rapid continuous transferring and re-transferring of very large data sets. After that, quad channel or octa channel is nice for those same data sets, but the increase in core count on the consumer end (as said above) really does cover most of the market until you need to switch to server racks.
 
In retrospect, 16c on desktop and wrx80 were the death knell for vanilla threadripper. I had a 1920X and it was a great system (maybe my favorite of all time), but I left TR and went am4 with the 3950X and haven't been tempted by TR since. The whole twin TR platform thing didn't make much sense to me in the first place tbh, but I think they were hedging their bets a bit there by releasing both on the chance that WRX80 bombed. Given it obviously didn't, what did TR offer? A platform that serves the super niche use case of more pcie and nothing else at a slightly lower cost? I've never heard of a use case that made much sense for that, anyway, just massive storage arrays for ripped movies or other oddities.

That said, AMD had built a bit of a reputation on socket longevity, so this pretty much kills that. They haven't officially said TR is dead, so it could be a zen3 chiplet demand issue as it did take them almost a year and a half after the desktop chips launched to get any kind of TR out, so maybe they'll release it this summer when the wrx80 exclusivity wears off. Probably depends on the wrx80 take rate and Epyc demand.

I think threadripper pro will continue, but TR would most likely die when am5 comes anyway as the desktop parts will probably get another core bump, meaning it makes even less sense as an intermediate platform.
 
drutman said:
Unless you need quad channel RAM HEDT is dead for most users including myself (X99 platform still daily driver).
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Arguably dual channel with double the bandwidth in some cases is just fine. And the desktop core count caught up to the hedt offerings. I guess it was really only a matter of time. A niche product era that for the needs at the time.
 
Honestly it kind of pisses me off because I was thinking a new processor would come out and I would be able to just drop in a new chip later. They aren't wrong though, 16/32 chips are all I really need most of the time. I can't say I fully use my 32/64 rig all that often but when needed, it does get the job done fast. But as most things these days, if your application supports GPU rendering/processing, that will blow away the cpu based equivalent.

Though on another note, if we say sure HEDT is mostly dead and there are only a small number of people willing to build that kind of a rig, WTF wouldn't you still sell them outside of OEMs? Seriously, that is the real question the whole TR pro thing put in my head. To me that is just what really annoys me the most. Even if the market is small, it is still there so they just close it and force the people to standard desktop chips.
 
I was kind of figuring they would not release a regular Threadripper 5000 series. What I did not expect was OEM only. That part disappoints me. I was thinking about pairing an Asus TRX80 Sage motherboard with a 5000 series Threadripper Pro. I have zero desire to buy an OEM system outside of a laptop. I really wanted a system with plenty of PCIe lanes and SLOTS. Eight channel memory ices that cake nicely. Yes, I do not need it. I just love working on high-end hardware. I also have a couple adapter cards I cannot use because most boards these days have one to two usable slots if you have a modern GPU installed. The Z490 Hero had the perfect layout. The Z590 Hero and Z690 Hero unfortunately do not. I guess I may need to breakdown and buy an ugly ass PCIe breakout box instead of having everything neat inside the full tower case.
 
LurkerLito said:
Honestly it kind of pisses me off because I was thinking a new processor would come out and I would be able to just drop in a new chip later
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Considering that it is a 2019 release and AMD current track record with their chipset that was perfectly reasonable expectation.

LurkerLito said:
Though on another note, if we say sure HEDT is mostly dead and there are only a small number of people willing to build that kind of a rig, WTF wouldn't you still sell them outside of OEMs? Seriously, that is the real question the whole TR pro thing put in my head. To me that is just what really annoys me the most. Even if the market is small, it is still there so they just close it and force the people to standard desktop chips.
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Exclusive deal certainly do come back with an advantage for AMD, my guess, certain OEM would not made TR pro system and all the signing of driver/what not that come with it without an exclusive deal or at least not the same price point ? Compared to how small the DYU market would be for that type of device would be, it could be an logical choice to make. They even lock the cpu to their eco-system apparently:
https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-is-using-amd-psb-to-vendor-lock-amd-cpus/

In the past, I am right to understand that the threadripper pro at launch were OEM only and then became available:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/12/22227638/amd-threadripper-pro-available-directly-to-consumers

So maybe once again it could be just a contract of windows of exclusivity with the OEM, to help their sales/supply.
 
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pendragon1 said:
youngins might not realize it though, they were in diapers when that chip came out :) that was the first "consumer" chip to break $1k wasnt it?
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Nah that was probably the pentium 2 though most people probably don't even remember those lol. I remember shopping with my dad and we were astounded at how expensive it was since you could buy a whole computer for the price but this was back in 1997.

Since AMD artificially gimped consumer threadripper with memory limitations I'm not surprised people jumped ship to the pro line and they killed it off.
 
LukeTbk said:
In the past, I am right to understand that the threadripper pro at launch were OEM only and then became available:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/12/22227638/amd-threadripper-pro-available-directly-to-consumers

So maybe once again it could be just a contract of windows of exclusivity with the OEM, to help their sales/supply.
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Yep, they gave lenovo a 3 month headstart before releasing retail. TPU had an article mon or tue that said that they would probably do the same thing with this release. All may not be lost.
 
There is not much point to Threadripper long term. For gaming it was never the best option, and for multi threaded work massively parallel ARM is the future. I paid a lot of money for my 3990x, but an entire Mac Studio can be had for the same price that I paid for just the 3990x CPU and it got the same score as it in multithreaded Geekbench workloads and crushed it in single threaded performance. Memory bandwidth? The 3990x gets absolutely wrecked by the Mac Studio. Obviously this is just one benchmark and there still plenty of areas the 3990x will outperform the M1 Ultra (at least I expect it to be the case), but the future is clear.

I love my 3990X and ran the shit out of it overclocked and watercooled for scientific workloads but I just don't see a point to a HEDT platform five years down the road
 
Like others have said...where is the need in 98% of cases that isnt met by current and future domestic Ryzen releases? I haven't really tapped the full power of my 2014 HEDT X99 rig. I got it cos I had the money and it would look impressive. Also it will last me another 2-3 years so in terms of longevity it's been a bargain. But those that would actually use the power of TR...would they wait 8-9 years between builds? I doubt it.
 
Even gladder I decided not to go TR and a 5950x would be enough for UHD encoding
 
daglesj said:
Like others have said...where is the need in 98% of cases that isnt met by current and future domestic Ryzen releases? I haven't really tapped the full power of my 2014 HEDT X99 rig. I got it cos I had the money and it would look impressive. Also it will last me another 2-3 years so in terms of longevity it's been a bargain. But those that would actually use the power of TR...would they wait 8-9 years between builds? I doubt it.
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Big core counts, big PCIE lane counts, high ram amounts (without fighting it). My workstations run a minimum of 128G of RAM - I regularly use 3+ PCIE slots - and most of the time, there's at least one mega-VM (8-12 cores, 64G of ram) running on it.

I have a 3960X system as the main workstation, and we built a "micro" version with a 3950X and x570. The 3950 does fine, but getting it happy with >64G of memory was a PITA, while the TR box just took a bump to SOC voltage. The 3950 is already maxed out (GPU, USB 3.1 card, 10G NIC), while the TR box has 2 slots free (AND can use all the extra NVMe slots that it has). Etc.

Now am I an edge case? Oh hell yes. But those uses do exist :-/ TR/x299/x99/x399 were a GODSEND for what I do.
 
lopoetve said:
Big core counts, big PCIE lane counts, high ram amounts (without fighting it). My workstations run a minimum of 128G of RAM - I regularly use 3+ PCIE slots - and most of the time, there's at least one mega-VM (8-12 cores, 64G of ram) running on it.

I have a 3960X system as the main workstation, and we built a "micro" version with a 3950X and x570. The 3950 does fine, but getting it happy with >64G of memory was a PITA, while the TR box just took a bump to SOC voltage. The 3950 is already maxed out (GPU, USB 3.1 card, 10G NIC), while the TR box has 2 slots free (AND can use all the extra NVMe slots that it has). Etc.

Now am I an edge case? Oh hell yes. But those uses do exist :-/ TR/x299/x99/x399 were a GODSEND for what I do.
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I was waiting for that. There is always one...:D
 
lopoetve said:
Big core counts, big PCIE lane counts, high ram amounts (without fighting it). My workstations run a minimum of 128G of RAM - I regularly use 3+ PCIE slots - and most of the time, there's at least one mega-VM (8-12 cores, 64G of ram) running on it.

I have a 3960X system as the main workstation, and we built a "micro" version with a 3950X and x570. The 3950 does fine, but getting it happy with >64G of memory was a PITA, while the TR box just took a bump to SOC voltage. The 3950 is already maxed out (GPU, USB 3.1 card, 10G NIC), while the TR box has 2 slots free (AND can use all the extra NVMe slots that it has). Etc.

Now am I an edge case? Oh hell yes. But those uses do exist :-/ TR/x299/x99/x399 were a GODSEND for what I do.
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You sound like you earn income from whatever you do with these systems. If that’s the case looking in to enterprise gear of off lease gear might be in your future instead of TR. but if you make a living doing it, it makes sense to continue using it even if you have to start looking at commercial series stuff.
 
jmilcher said:
You sound like you earn income from whatever you do with these systems. If that’s the case looking in to enterprise gear of off lease gear might be in your future instead of TR. but if you make a living doing it, it makes sense to continue using it even if you have to start looking at commercial series stuff.
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Some yes - it feeds directly into both income and community/charity work I do.

The issue with enterprise gear is the noise - most aren't built to be "pleasant" around in a home office or the like, which is where both of the main workstations live - and I like them to be as powerful as possible, so noise is a concern.

I also fund a good portion of these myself (some donations from big OEMs too), so paying for TR Pro makes me hurt a little inside.

edit: They also serve dual purposes. Main workstation is also capable of being a pretty-darned-good gaming system, the 3950X doubles as a VR system (run a script, it dumps the workstation/server workloads off to something else and reboots to windows, then goes back when done), etc. Not sure how well a P620 or the like would do with a consumer GPU in it... since we're not using Quadro features, we don't buy Quadros (except in the VDI environment, which has GRID cards).
 
paradoxical said:
There is not much point to Threadripper long term. For gaming it was never the best option, and for multi threaded work massively parallel ARM is the future. I paid a lot of money for my 3990x, but an entire Mac Studio can be had for the same price that I paid for just the 3990x CPU and it got the same score as it in multithreaded Geekbench workloads and crushed it in single threaded performance. Memory bandwidth? The 3990x gets absolutely wrecked by the Mac Studio. Obviously this is just one benchmark and there still plenty of areas the 3990x will outperform the M1 Ultra (at least I expect it to be the case), but the future is clear.

I love my 3990X and ran the shit out of it overclocked and watercooled for scientific workloads but I just don't see a point to a HEDT platform five years down the road
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I used it for XRD and Electron microscopy software, what sci workloads did you run?
 
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