Beefy Zen 3 chips on the way

AMD is ramping up the distribution of its Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-series processors that will soon vie for a spot on list of best CPUs for workstations. In July, AMD said that these Zen 3 processors will become more widely available, expanding to "leading system integrators worldwide." However, PC DIY enthusiasts longing to put together a Threadripper Pro 5000 build will have to wait until sometime later in the year for the opportunity – when processors and motherboards will debut in the components market.

It felt like a rather long wait for the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000WX CPUs to arrive, and we haven't seen a flood of buying options. As long-awaited successors to the Threadripper Pro 3000 series (Zen 2), the AMD announced the new series in March but debuted with a lone partner in early May. The Lenovo P620 Tower Workstation PC went on sale with Threadripper Pro 5000WX CPUs in May – about two months late.

A fortnight ago, Dell joined in the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-series party with the announcement of its new Precision 7865 workstation systems. As with the Lenovo system, the Precision 7865 was configurable with vast amounts of RAM and fast storage to make up for the 64C/128T of compute these Threadrippers can provide.

Suppose you want some more details to chew over concerning the architecture, tech specs, and performance of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series. Summary of the charms of these computing behemoths includes the following bullet points:

• Up to 64 cores and 128 threads
• Zen 3 cores for the leadership IPC from AMD
• Up to 4.5 GHz boost clocks
• 8-channel UDIMM and RDIMM support
• 256MB L3 cache
• Support for up to 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes
• AMD Shadow Stack security
• ISV software collaboration for optimized pro apps
• Strong performance / price balance and relative power efficiency

AMD says that the same processors heading to system integrators in July will become available in the DIY market later in the year. DIY enthusiasts are likely to appreciate the CPU overclocking and memory overclocking to squeeze the best out of their hand-crafted setups.

Interestingly, we have spotted some discrete CPU sales worldwide, in locations such as Canada, the UK, France, and Holland. As it is closest to the US, we have shoehorned the Canadian prices (converted to USD) into the product table.

With multiple retailers already listing these SKUs, it looks like "later this year" could be earlier than that phraseology usually indicates. In the meantime, AMD has its Ryzen 7000 processors coming to market in Fall.