AMD Reveals Ryzen Threadripper 9000 Family: Big Zen 5 Chips for HEDT and Workstations

Headlining this evening’s announcements for AMD is a fresh batch of CPUs for the HEDT and workstation markets. Taking to the stage at Computex 2025, AMD’s Jack Huynh announced that the company’s Threadripper family of CPUs is receiving its long-awaited Zen 5 facelift, upgrading the CPUs to AMD’s latest architecture. The chonky chips, with up to 96 Zen 5 CPU cores in the flagship Threadripper Pro 9995WX part, will be available in July.

For those unfamiliar with Threadripper, this is AMD’s on-again/off-again series of chips to cover users who need something more powerful than AMD’s current 16 core Ryzen and Ryzen Pro offerings. The Threadripper chips are derived from AMD’s EPYC processors – in this case, EPYC 9005 Turin – essentially repacking the silicon to a socket and platform more suited for desktop use. The Threadripper family itself is divided into two segments, a high-end not-EPYC-in-name-only set of Pro chips with up to 96 cores and 128 PCIe 5 lanes that’s aimed at workstation users, and a lower-tier set of vanilla (non-Pro) chips with up to 64 cores and 48 PCIe 5 lanes aimed at HEDT users.

Notably, Threadripper isn’t really aimed at the gaming market, as the server architecture it’s derived from isn’t a good fit for the low-latency core-to-core access that games like. Instead, Threadripper is all about prosumer and professional users, scaling up with the amount of processing power, memory, and I/O that they need.

For this latest iteration of the Threadripper family – codenamed Shimada Peak – the 9000 series’ configuration largely retains status quo from the Zen 4-based Threadripper 7000 series. Which is to say that the various chip SKUs have the same core counts, the same number of DDR5 memory channels, and the same number of PCIe lanes as their 7000 series predecessors. This is consistent with what we’ve seen with the rest of AMD’s Zen 5 based-products – Ryzen and EPYC – which are similar upgrades. Ultimately, with AMD reusing their Zen 4 era I/O dies and the Zen 5 CCDs containing just as many CPU cores as their predecessors, the focus on Zen 5 has been making it a drop-in replacement for Zen 4 platforms, and that mindset has extended to Threadripper as well.

To that end, the new Threadripper chips use the same sTR5 socket as their predecessors. As well as the same WR90/TRX50 motherboards. So the new chips should work in existing boards following a BIOS upgrade.

With that in mind, the driving force behind the new Threadripper 9000 processors – and differentiating them from the existing 7000 series chips – is all about the Zen 5 architecture, and the performance benefits it brings. For this market in particular, full-speed AVX-512 support is particularly notable, potentially doubling AVX-512 performance over the older 7000 series chips. Otherwise, AMD is focusing on the usual markets, such as content creation, coding (or rather, compiling), and most recently, localized AI training. Overall, Zen 5 offered around a 16% IPC gain depending on the workload, so coupled with a modest clockspeed lift here, it should make the new Threadripper chips around 20% faster on a broad average.

Threadripper Pro: 96 Cores, 384MB L3 Cache, 128 PCIe Lanes

Leading things off, we have the Threadripper Pro 9000 series chips, 6 SKUs altogether. These parts once again range from between 12 CPU cores to 96 cores, and all offer the same support for 8 memory lanes and 128 PCIe 5 lanes – as well as the same 350 Watt TDP. Of note here, like AMD’s EPYCs, the maximum memory clockspeed has been bumped up a bit; Threadripper Pro 9000 can run at up to DDR5-6400, versus the more pokey DDR5-5200 speeds supported by the 7000 series chips.

AMD is emphasizing drop-in compatibility with the new chips, and looking at the specs, it’s remarkable just how similar the new chips are to the old ones. Besides retaining the same model numbers and core counts, even the base clockspeeds are untouched. Only the maximum memory and CPU clockspeeds have been touched, with the latter now boosting to as high as 5.4GHz. Otherwise, all the rest of the improvements for the new parts are being driven by the Zen 5 architecture.

And since these are Pro chips, they also get AMD’s Pro feature set for enterprise IT manageability. Along with core counts, memory channels, and PCIe lanes, this is the other big differentiator between the vanilla Threadripper and Threadripper Pro chips.

Leading this new group of processors is the 9995WX, which is all but the EPYC 9655P put into a workstation. That means all 96 CPU cores the platform supports, as well as 384MB of L3 cache, and AMD’s full suite of hardware features. AMD has not published any pricing information at this time, but I’d expect this chip to be several thousand dollars – if not a bit more due to a lack of competition from Intel

Threadripper: 64 Cores, 256MB L3 Cache, 48 PCIe Lanes

Sitting below the Pro parts, we have the vanilla Threadripper processors. Aimed at the HEDT market, these are scaled-down chips with fewer cores/CCDs, fewer memory channels, and fewer PCIe lanes. But otherwise it shares all of the platform feature enhancements that are core to the entire Threadripper family.

As before, AMD is offering just 3 SKUs here, with 64, 32, and 24 cores respectively. Like the Pro parts, the boost clockspeeds top out at 5.4GHz here; but unlike the Pro parts, the base clockspeeds have been nudged up versus the previous generation. Now no chip is slower than 3.2GHz, versus 2.5GHz on the prior-generation 7980X.

Otherwise, all of these chips have access to the same 48 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and 4 DDR5 memory channels as before. And as a reminder, even this HEDT platform requires RDIMMs – it is derived from server hardware, after all.

The Competition & Availability

For the moment, at least, AMD is facing limited competition in the HEDT and workstation markets. Intel has yet to announce any new workstation/HEDT parts based on their Granite Rapids (Xeon 6) server hardware, so Intel’s current lineup is their existing Sapphire Rapids-based Xeons. A lack of CPU cores already put those chips on the backfoot against Threadripper 7000 when it came to CPU-bound workloads, so Threadripper 9000 should widen this gap.

AMD has posted a few performance slides as part of its Computex keynote presentation. The usual caveats with vendor-supplied benchmarks aside, most of their focus is on comparing the Threadripper Pro 9995WX to the most recent Xeon W9-3595X. Suffice it to say, AMD has themselves comfortably in the lead.

Wrapping things up, AMD says that they will be shipping the new Threadripper 9000 chips in July. AMD will be selling the non-Pro and “select” Pro chips as boxed retail processors. Otherwise the full chip family will be available to OEMs. System vendors should have 9000 series systems available later this year.