AMD not ships its Ryzen Threadripper CPUs for high-end desktops and positions its Ryzen Threadripper Professional for workstations. However now that single-socket motherboards for AMD’s 4th Era EPYC ‘Genoa’ processors can be found, you could not need to settle with 64-core Threadripper Professional however go for a monstrous system with 96 cores and as much as 12 channels of DDR5 reminiscence.
Not too long ago ASRock Rack launched a number of single-socket SP5 motherboards (opens in new tab) for AMD’s EPYC 9004-series processors (by way of HardwareLuxx.de (opens in new tab)), together with the Deep Micro-ATX GenoaD8UD-2T/X550 and GenoaD24QM3-2L2T/BCM motherboards which can be formally aimed toward servers, however which can be utilized to construct an final battle station with a 96-core CPU and a great deal of reminiscence assuming that you would be able to afford the CPU and discover an acceptable chassis.
For the reason that ASRock GenoaD8UD-2T/X550 (opens in new tab) and the GenoaD24QM3-2L2T/BCM (opens in new tab) are certainly server motherboards, they help every thing one involves count on from a server, together with eight or 24 slots for DDR5 reminiscence modules, 4 PCIe 5.0 x16 slots with CXL 1.1 on high, two M.2-2280 slots for SSDs with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, a number of MCIO connectors supporting PCIe 5.0 or SATA connectivity, two or 4 10GbE ports (managed by the Intel X550 or the Broadcom BCM57416 chip), one GbE connector for administration, and the Aspeed AST2600 BMC.
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In the meantime, the motherboards do not need frequent desktops and workstation options, together with high-speed USB4 or Thunderbolt 3/4 ports, audio connectors (and acceptable controllers), and traditional SATA connectors on the motherboard.
Constructing a workstation that includes the GenoaD8UD-2T/X550 will probably be fairly difficult as a performance-demanding fanatic might want to procure an M.2-to-PCIe x16 adapter card to reap the benefits of the most recent SSDs that includes a PCIe 5.0 interface, a correct cooling system for AMD’s EPYC processor in LGA 6096 packaging, and so forth. Additionally, do not forget that EPYCs don’t overclock (96-core monsters additionally don’t function excessive clocks), and they’re imagined to work with DDR5-4800 reminiscence, which might not be an enormous downside because the platforms have eight or 12 reminiscence channels that present loads of bandwidth.
Constructing a robust workstation primarily based on AMD’s 96-core EPYC is dear and peculiar. Nevertheless, the reward is, after all, a great deal of cores and reminiscence, and if it’s worthwhile to run workloads that may scale to 96 cores, it is perhaps well worth the cash and hassle.
