by
Zak Killian
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Monday, December 19, 2022, 03:06 PM EDT
The state of the HEDT market has been pretty bleak the last few years. AMD's Threadrippers went PRO-only, while Intel's been letting its high-end customers languish on the Cascade Lake-X platform that's still rocking the old Skylake core design at its heart. The blue team has new workstation processors on the way, but of course, so does AMD—though it'll be a bit of a wait, according to the latest leak.
This information comes by way of a tweet from respected leaker chi11eddog (@g01d3nm4ng0 on Twitter) who doesn't tweet often, but is usually spot-on when they do. The leaker gets straight to the point by saying that AMD's Storm Peak platform will make its debut in September 2023 in both HEDT and Workstation forms. If true, that's welcome news for fans of many-core CPUs and massive high-speed I/O.
For context, AMD's current-generation Ryzen Threadripper processors are codenamed Chagall, and they only come in PRO form. That means that until recently, if you wanted to buy one, you had to get in touch with an OEM or system integrator that sells complete Threadripper systems. It also means that they're ludicrously expensive, but given that they are basically just EPYC CPUs in a desktop chassis, that probably shouldn't be too surprising.
Storm Peak, then, is the codename for AMD's next-generation Threadripper processors that are rumored to be based on the same general design as Genoa, the company's latest EPYC CPUs. Like Genoa, they use AMD's very fast Zen 4 CPU core. According to the leak, AMD will once again be releasing a series of Threadripper PRO CPUs targeted at workstation users that is basically EPYC-in-a-box: eight-channel DDR5 memory, 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and no overclocking.
It's likely that the new Threadrippers will use the same SP5 socket as AMD's latest EPYCs.
However, the leak also states that Threadripper for non-pro HEDT is making a return, too. We haven't seen such processors since the days of Zen 2 and the Ryzen 3000 series. Threadripper HEDT will purportedly come with half the memory channels and PCIe lanes of the full-fat version, which is the same as the older chips. It'll also have overclocking support, which is a bit of a terrifying prospect given the already-high power draw of the Ryzen 9 7950X.
The leaker didn't share any details of the processors themselves, but given the specifications of EPYC Genoa, we can reasonably guess that the full "workstation" version could come with as many as 96 CPU cores. It's possible that the HEDT version could have the same peak core count—after all, the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X exists—but we wouldn't bet on it.
An EPYC Genoa CPU missing its heatspreader, showing twelve CCDs for up to 96 cores.
Unfortunately, fans of the red team looking for something beefier than Raphael will apparently have a good long while to wait. As we mentioned above, the leaker says that these chips are destined to debut in September of next year. That's over nine months away, so don't hold your breath if you're holding out for Zen 4 HEDT.
