You can’t go any more powerful than this.
AMD’s Ryzen chips are already plenty powerful, but for those users who are looking for the absolute best, the company’s aptly-named Threadripper chips are the option you should check out. The lineup took a bit of a break with Zen 3, where AMD only released Threadripper chips for business use, but now, the lineup is fully back for Zen 4. Now, Linux computer manufacteror System76 has new workstation desktops with the CPUs.
At CES 2024, System76 showed off its Thelio Major computer, a desktop PC that’s powered with up to an AMD Threadripper 7980X. That chip comes with a whopping 64 cores and 128 threads and is based off the Zen 4 architecture, so as far as silicon goes, it’s probably the very best silicon AMD is willing to offer to customers right now. There are a number of pros and cons to these high-end desktop chips compared to regular consumer chips like the Ryzen series, and the generalized consensus is that for most people, these aren’t worth it. They can smash through multithreaded tasks on a whim, but they’re rather lackluster in single-core performance. That being said, if you happen to have a workload that benefits from this kind of hardware, this is probably among the best chips you can get.
System76 is showing off the capabilities of the Thelio Major using a demo program that alternates between Stable Diffusion and Blender, with the CPU tackling Blender and the GPU tackling AI tasks with Stable Diffusion—the unit System76 is showing off on Gigabyte’s booth has an NVIDIA RTX A6000, while the unit on AMD’s booth has a Radeon Pro W700. It’s not immediately clear whether these GPUs will be featured on the final Thelio Major units. System76 is also preparing a “Thelio Mega” that has a quad-GPU configuration and will be the company’s most powerful desktop computer, but it says that it should come at a later date.
System76 has not detailed how much the Thelio Major or the Thelio Mega will cost, but expect them to be rather expensive since they’re using chips worth several thousand bucks alone.
Source: System76
