Asus has revealed that AMD will be launching the TR5 platform this year
Intel unveiled its latest Xeon W-series workstation processors last month, and while the top-of-the-line Xeon W9-3495X is still outperformed by AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX in terms of core count, its multicore performance is still quite impressive. However, its true competitor is AMD’s next-generation Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7000 series, which is essentially a variant of the current EPYC 9004 Genoa processors.
In the latest Xeon W 3495X/2495X processor review video by Asus’ Tony, he revealed that AMD will be launching a brand new TR5 platform in the second half of this year, with corresponding processors that are expected to be part of the Threadripper Pro 7000 series. As Zen 4 architecture processors support PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory, while the current Zen 3 processors only support PCIe 4.0 and DDR4 memory, the Threadripper Pro 7000 processors, like their desktop counterparts, will also need to switch to a new interface, from TR4 to TR5.
The Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7000 processor is essentially a variant of the EPYC Genoa processor, and TR5 should be the same as SP5. As AMD basically no longer releases non-Pro versions of the Ryzen Threadripper processor, there will not be a quad-channel variant, and all variants will have eight-channel DDR5 memory and offer up to 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes. The overall specifications will be similar to those of the current EPYC 9004, but it is uncertain whether AMD will push its 96-core product into the workstation market, though the 64-core product is definitely planned.
However, Intel also plans to release a successor to the Sapphire Rapids processor called Emerald Rapids later this year, with a maximum core count of 64 cores. Of course, Xeon W is unlikely to update so quickly, but AMD can decide whether to release processors with more core counts based on its competition.