Lenovo ThinkStation P620 [AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro] For AMD, the tide is turning and the launch of the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 feels like a pivotal moment in the workstation market. Greg Corke puts the exciting new 64-core AMD Threadripper Pro workstation through its paces
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ver the last 12 months AMD has emerged as a serious competitor to Intel. We’ve seen great price / performance from the consumer focused 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen, but it’s with 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper that AMD has really turned up the heat. When Lenovo unveiled its ThinkStation P620 in July 2020, it caused some serious ripples in the workstation market. Powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro CPU, it meant Lenovo was the first major workstation manufacturer in nearly 15 years to launch a workstation with an AMD processor. And, with an exclusive agreement with AMD, it will be the only way you can get Threadripper Pro for at least a few months. Ryzen Threadripper, as the name suggests, is a family of desktop CPUs with lots of cores (and threads) to rip through multi-threaded applications like ray trace rendering, point cloud processing and simulation. With up to 64-cores, more than any other desktop / workstation CPU, it offers something that Intel simply can’t. As a brand, Threadripper is no stranger to the workstation market. Specialist manufacturers including Armari, BOXX, Scan, Workstation Specialists, Puget Systems, Boston, Velocity Micro, and InterPro have been offering workstations with the ‘consumer’ Threadripper CPU for some time. We use the word ‘consumer’ loosely here, as one can’t imagine many consumers have a need for a 64-core CPU. Semantics aside, there is no doubt these are insanely powerful processors. When third generation consumer Threadripper launched just over a year ago it made a huge statement. In multithreaded workflows that make 40
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maximum use of every single CPU core, like ray trace rendering, it not only left all Intel CPUs for dust, but its single threaded performance was better than Intel’s best 28-core Xeon CPUs. What’s more, to get anywhere close to Threadripper’s 64 cores, you needed two Intel Xeons in a desktop workstation, and a much larger budget. The performance argument for consumer Threadripper is extremely compelling, but for major OEMs this was not enough. In order for the
likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo and Fujitsu to take Threadripper seriously, AMD needed to develop a professional version.
What is Threadripper Pro? In short, AMD Ryzen Threadripper is to AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro, as Intel Core is to Intel Xeon. Both AMD CPUs share the same core silicon, but there are several features that set the workstation CPU apart from its ‘consumer’ sibling. These include more memory channels (8 vs 4), higher memory capacity (2TB vs 256GB) and additional PCIe Gen4 lanes (128 vs 64). Memory is arguably the biggest differentiator, and this will be especially important in memory intensive applications like Computational Fluid
Dynamics (CFD) or Finite Element Analysis (FEA), which are both used heavily in the automotive and aerospace industries, but also in AEC. Some of the more complex fluid flow or multi-physics simulations can literally eat up memory and by offering more capacity and the ability to feed data into the CPU much quicker via 8-channels, it should have a big impact on performance. In addition, those looking to use their workstation for multi-tasking, perhaps to run several different compute intensive tasks in parallel, should also see benefits. The increase in memory capacity has been enabled through support for RDIMM and LRDIMM modules – DDR4-3200. Error Correcting Code (ECC) is also supported, which is important for those running simulations over several hours or even days – and want to minimise the risk of crashes. Consumer Threadripper does support ECC memory, but not on all motherboards. Threadripper Pro also covers a wider range of cores and 12, 16, 32 and 64-core models are all available as options in the ThinkStation P620. In comparison, consumer Threadripper comes in 24, 32 or 64-core variants, while consumer CPUs with 16-cores or less come under the AMD Ryzen brand. Clock speeds for the 32-core Threadripper Pro 3975WX (3.5GHz to 4.2GHz Turbo) and 64-core 3995WX (2.7GHz to 4.2GHz Turbo) are slightly lower than consumer Threadripper CPUs with equivalent core counts, both in terms of base and boost frequency. According to AMD, this is because Threadripper Pro offers more functionality within the same power budget – specifically referring to memory bandwidth, capacity and the number of PCIe Gen4 lanes. www.AECmag.com
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