AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO Processors To Be Made Available To Consumers In March

Last summer, AMD followed-up on its third-gen Ryzen Threadripper releases with new “PRO” variants, catering to those who want a Threadripper platform that shares features with EPYC. At the time, the DIY crowd was a bit miffed, since AMD decided to keep the PRO variants exclusive to OEMs – most notably Lenovo. Well, those DIY pleas must have been heard, as AMD is now making the Threadripper PRO processors available to consumers.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors will now be directly available to consumers starting in March 2021!

Boasting up to 64 cores, 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, and 8 channels of memory, Threadripper PRO is the world’s fastest workstation processor: https://t.co/MKtJBTJT0A pic.twitter.com/cj1SorEKUY

— AMD Ryzen (@AMDRyzen) January 12, 2021

It’s interesting that this announcement wasn’t made during AMD’s official CES keynote, especially as computationally heavy workloads were talked about throughout. Nonetheless, with Threadripper PRO available to consumers, it means etailers like Amazon and Newegg should be offering them on their virtual shelves soon – March, as per the AMD tweet seen above.

In a nutshell, what a user has to gain with Threadripper PRO over regular Threadripper is an eight-channel memory controller for increased bandwidth, double the number of PCIe lanes, and a memory limit increase from 256GB to 2TB. 2TB in a personal workstation sounds mind-boggling in the best possible way, and it’s something that should give you a hint that you need to be willing to cough up a premium if you want to step-up from regular Threadripper.

AMD hasn’t released expected pricing of these chips, but the official launch is still up to two months off. Here’s how the current four models slot into AMD’s lineup:

Because the currently-available Threadripper PRO models are based on Zen 2, their release to the general market in March seems a little unusual – unless it means that this March launch will coincide with updated Zen 3 models? We can hope.

To that end, availability right now of most current-gen CPUs is abysmal. We searched around on multiple etailers for the current regular Threadrippers, and only found the 32-core 3970X available at one – the others are just non-existent. It might be naive thinking, but it’d be great if the Threadripper PRO launch was being pushed off to March so that supply can build up. Time will tell.