THE LABS IN ONE NUMBER
WE PUT TEN OF THE MEATIEST CONTENT CREATION SYSTEMS THROUGH RIGOROUS TESTING SO YOU CAN DECIDE WHICH IS PERFECT FOR YOUR DEMANDS
The big story in this month’s workstation Labs is the complete absence of Intel. Our number of the month, 64, explains why. Cores matter when it comes to the cutting edge of compute power, and AMD’s huge range of chips, right up to the 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, means it’s dominant.
I ntel must be worried. Every year that we pull together a selection of professional workstations for group testing, more of them have AMD’s processors and fewer Intel’s. This time round, not one of the systems sent for review has an Intel CPU onboard. We’re sure that Intel will fight back soon – see “When will Intel make a comeback?” on p89 – but, for now, AMD has the professional workstation market sewn up.
That doesn’t mean that this month’s labs test consists of ten identical systems. In fact, the variety is still huge. We set two price points – £3,000 and £8,000 inc VAT – and have machines boasting from 12 to 64 cores, taken from AMD’s Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper ranges. This Labs offers us our first taste of AMD’s new Ryzen Threadripper Pro, which is designed to go head-to-head with Intel Xeon workstation processors. One of the main features of this new range is eight-channel memory, where the non-Pro Threadripper only has quad-channel, and Ryzen merely dual-channel. The Threadripper Pro also borrows security features from AMD’s server-focused EPYC processor.
However, while AMD has a monopoly on workstation CPUs, the company still can’t break Nvidia’s hold on workstation GPUs. All but one of this month’s systems use a flavour of Nvidia’s latest Ampere generation of Quadro RTX cards. The one outlier has the very latest AMD Radeon Pro, the W6800. Our tests reveal whether it can show stiffer competition than previous Radeon Pro generations.
Amazingly, you can now buy a 24-core workstation for £3,000 inc VAT, and £8,000 will furnish you with more power than we can put into words. Whichever of our two budgets you aim for, you’ll enjoy incredible performance for every content creation, engineering or design task. Read on to find your perfect creative computing companion.