Mega-multithreading is back in the second generation of AMD's Ryzen Threadripper Pro CPUs, the 5000 WX series. They're set to launch first in Lenovo workstations late in March.

After a two-year wait, AMD is once again on the verge of releasing a new EPYC processor. By that, we don’t mean the upcoming Zen 5-based Ryzen 7000 CPUs tipped at CES 2022 (though we do imagine those could be quite epic, as well). Instead, we are referring to the launch of AMD’s first new Threadripper Pro processors since 2020, based on the company's EPYC server line.

The new Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-series chips, unveiled today, are set to launch first in Lenovo workstations March 21. These big, bold CPUs are designed for very high-powered desktop platforms for pro-grade content creation, engineering, and advanced software applications. With the top model packing 64 cores clocked a full 1GHz above AMD’s current best server chips, they look poised to make quite the impact.

When it debuted in 2020, Threadripper Pro enabled two key bump-ups over the ordinary non-Pro Threadripper: a doubling of available PCI Express lanes, and a doubling in the available memory bandwidth. Threadripper Pro offered 128 PCI Express 4.0 lanes, plus support for up to a whopping 2TB of memory. Also a part of the Pro scheme: official support for ECC memory, for professional applications that demand it.

The star of AMD’s new Threadripper Pro 5000 series is the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX, which looks like simply a monstrously powerful chip on paper. Like its direct predecessor, the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX, it contains 64 cores, with SMT technology that enables the processor to manage 128 threads. These cores are set with a base clock of 2.7GHz, which climbs up to 4.5GHz when the boost feature is activated. AMD will also offer four other chips in the line, with fewer cores.

To recap who these chips are for: The Threadripper Pros are professional-level workstation processors that are designed for specific workloads that can leverage their combination of extreme core/thread count and sustained performance under load. AMD posits these chips as excellent fits for software development and compiling, production-level content creation, design and manufacturing, and high-memory scenarios working with big data sets. They can also be handy for training in AI/machine learning environments.

Although the Threadripper Pro 5000 series will launch alongside the projected mainstream Zen 5 Ryzens in the fall, it doesn’t make use of that new microarchitecture. It’s based instead on AMD’s current Zen 3 technology. In point of fact, the 5995WX is clocked only slightly faster than the 3995WX, which has a boost clock of 4.3GHz, but the performance gap between the two should be significantly larger than their differences in clock speed suggest. The current 3995WX chip is based on the old Zen 2 architecture, and Zen 3 has various improvements to increase performance per clock that ought to give the 5995WX a decisive advantage.

The 5995WX’s specs are even more impressive when compared against AMD’s leading Zen 3-based EPYC server processor, the EPYC 7763. It, too, has 64 cores and support for 128 threads, but it operates at significantly slower clock speeds, with a 2.45GHz base clock and a 3.5GHz boost clock. Here, the 5995WX has a full 1GHz advantage in clock speed at boost, and what’s more impressive is that this was possible while maintaining the same 280-watt TDP as first-generation Threadripper Pro.

AMD is working up all of its new Threadripper Pro 5000-series processors in a similar manner, giving them slightly boosted clock speeds over their direct 3000-series predecessors. The one exception, in this case, is the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5965WX, which doesn’t have a direct parallel in the first-generation Threadripper Pro line. Instead, the 5965WX fills a gap in the new lineup that was left vacant in the old one. With 24 cores, the 5965WX slides in neatly between the 32-core 5975WX and the 16-core 5955WX. A low-end 12-core unit will also be on offer, for five total Pro 5000 WX chips: 12, 16, 24, 32 and 64 cores.

Along with the enhancements inherent in the microarchitecture and the elevated clock speeds, the new Ryzen Threadripper Pro chips benefit from another design change: an increase in the amount of L3 cache accessible by each core. Threadripper Pro 3000-series CPUs contain 16MB of L3 cache that is shared among clusters of four cores each.

What does this mean? Even though the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX has 256MB of L3 cache, the most that any one core could access was 16MB. AMD reworked this aspect of the design to increase the size of clusters from four cores to eight cores, and simultaneously the amount of L3 cache per cluster was upped from 16MB to 32MB. This can be advantageous in certain workloads as a single core can now access up to 32MB of L3 cache in the event that, say, only a single core is in use, or just one core per cluster.

It should come as no surprise that AMD also took the time in its announcement to point out the performance advantage of its new Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors over several competing Intel chips. The chip maker also announced performance enhancements in specific pro-facing applications including Autodesk and the Adobe creative suite. As always, these claims need to be taken with a grain of salt, especially as AMD did not present direct comparisons with Intel’s newest and fastest competing Xeon processors.

Whether AMD will offer the Threadripper Pro 5000 WX to the aftermarket with support from motherboard OEMs remains to be seen. (AMD did open up several of the original Threadripper Pro 3000 WX-series CPUs for DIY use, in concert with a handful of elite-grade WRX80-chipset motherboards.) The main implementation of the original Threadripper Pro, though, was in Lenovo's ThinkStation P620, which we reviewed back in December 2020. (Check out our review at the link, as well as our separate first look at Threadripper Pro CPU performance.) AMD notes that the first 5000 WX chips will appear in a refreshed version of the ThinkStation P620 featuring the Pro 5000 WX line.

The first Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series chips will launch in the P620 March 21, but the company has not shared any information on separately sold versions to be available in retail channels. Given that, it's no surprise that the company also has not yet revealed the price of any of these new chips themselves, either as singles or in volume. Stay tuned.

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Michael Justin Allen Sexton, a life-long tech enthusiast and gamer, covers PC components and desktops for PCMag. He began breaking down PCs and repairing other electronic devices at the age of 10. When he isn't gaming or tearing apart gadgets to learn how they work, he enjoys spending his spare time studying history and other cultures. He is also a practitioner of Tae Kwon Do with a first-degree black belt.

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