AMD Threadripper Pro 5000 to expand availability to more OEMs, hit retail eventually

Something to look forward to: When AMD’s long-awaited Zen 3 Threadripper workstation CPUs launched in March, they were only available in Lenovo’s OEM systems. Now we know when they’ll come to other original equipment manufacturers and beyond. One OEM company’s review confirms noticeable performance gains over the processors’ competition and predecessors.

AMD announced this week that it’s widening the availability of the Threadripper Pro 5000 WX series processors. Over a year after releasing the Zen 3 standard Ryzen CPUs, AMD launched their Threadripper counterparts in March, but only as part of Lenovo’s ThinkStation P620. Starting in July, the 5000 WX CPUs will feature in other OEM systems, including the Precision 7865 Dell announced earlier this month. AMD plans to release Zen 3 Threadrippers for DIY consumers later this year.

Among the companies offering 5000 WX workstations, Puget Systems just published a rundown of the series’ performance in content creation applications. In nearly all of them, the new Threadrippers show a clear improvement over their Zen 2 equivalents and increase their lead over Intel’s Xeon processors.

The biggest victories for the 5000 WX series are in DaVinci Resolve, Cinebench R23 multi-core, V-Ray, and Adobe After Effects. The advantage is most acute in the multi-core score for After Effects. However, Intel’s Core i9-12900K trades blows with AMD’s new products in some programs like Adobe Premier Pro, Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, and Cinebench R23 single-core performance. Intel’s next generation of workstation processors will probably come with Sapphire Rapids later in 2022.