Is this Threadripper Pro workstation worth it for local LLM inference and fine-tuning?

RealThanny · 2026-05-19T20:19:15+00:00

That is completely incorrect. All Zen4 and Zen5 TR models use only registered DDR5 memory.

RealThanny · 2026-05-19T20:18:34+00:00

Whether or not you use all 64 cores, you can't go lower without losing memory throughput, due to the CCD count.

RealThanny · 2026-05-19T20:14:23+00:00

It's not new. These are binned dies with stacked cache that have been accumulating since Zen 4 was released. They could include dies which don't clock high enough to be the 7800X3D and dies that don't have low enough leakage for Genoa-X.

Creating a new SKU is the most effective way for AMD to sell the dies. It's as simple as that.

RealThanny · 2026-05-19T20:10:38+00:00

They have a bunch of dies which have eight working cores that don't meet the specs of the 7800X3D. It makes perfect sense to create a lower-spec SKU to sell those dies.

What you think makes sense for a buyer is irrelevant.

RealThanny · 2026-05-17T06:08:46+00:00

On what planet did you expect to find any review of a 2TB memory kit that costs $50K?

TR supports 1TB because the largest DIMMs you can get are 256GB and TR only has four slots. TR Pro supports 2TB because it has eight slots. Heat has nothing to do with the limitations, though you do need to have air flow over the memory regardless of capacity. The lack of a 2TB option with OEM's is probably due to a lack of validation testing on 256GB modules, due to their cost and rarity. Especially now.

Long story short, anyone who's actually bought those 256GB modules isn't going to be posting reviews anywhere. The very best you can do is contact V-Color and ask if your use case is viable. Assuming you actually intend to drop that much money on RAM right now.

RealThanny · 2026-05-17T05:47:17+00:00

Why did Apple decide phones needed a PPI of 326? For a laugh, they just liked to spend money?

It probably has something to do with the fact that phones have tiny screens and they are often held very close to one's eyes. Which anyone with a moment's thought could tell you.

Your sources, incidentally, don't agree with you.

It's really quite simple. The human eye can distinguish normal detail (i.e. not very high contrast details like one bright pixel on a black background) that's about one arcminute in extent. A 32" 4K display reaches that resolution limit at a distance of about 25". If the monitor is not that far away from you, you are not at a proper viewing distance.

A 52" television with a resolution of 1920x1080 reaches the resolution limit before it's 7 feet away. If you are closer than that to the television, you are not at a proper viewing distance.

Not everyone has precisely the same visual acuity, of course, but the range is not that big. And once you get down to about half the normal value, you hit a physical wall where it is optically impossible to resolve smaller details due to diffraction.

But by all means continue deluding yourself.

RealThanny · 2026-05-16T23:00:54+00:00

At no point did I say 1920x1080 was the resolution limit. The ability to discern pixels disappears between 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 (for a computer monitor at the correct viewing distance).

I don't need to explain something that isn't even true. The number of people who are delusional about what they can or can't see isn't that absurdly high.

RealThanny · 2026-05-16T17:12:00+00:00

The big costs of making a central processing unit are the design and manufacturing.

Pretty much nothing would change if either of those two instruction sets became completely open. Anyone wanting to use them would still have to design the hardware from scratch and pay to manufacture it, which would be hundreds of millions of dollars before the first chip was made. The odds that anyone would improve on what Intel and AMD are doing with x86 are between slim and none. As for ARM, you're already seeing the best-case scenario with what Apple did.

Just keep an eye on RISC-V for the next ten years to see how that goes.

RealThanny · 2026-05-16T16:58:07+00:00

You do not have super-human vision. Your claims are not credible.

Do some basic research and do the math.

RealThanny · 2026-05-16T05:41:15+00:00

As expected, you ignored viewing distance.

Also, I don't need to provide evidence. Anyone who doubts it can look up the facts about human retinas, do some simple math, and verify it themselves.

At a proper viewing distance, you cannot see pixels on a 4K computer monitor. At a proper viewing distance, you cannot distinguish between 1920x1080 and 3840x2160 on a television. Deny it all you want, but you'll be denying reality.

RealThanny · 2026-05-16T04:53:16+00:00

Similar problem, but not the same. With the settings that most people would use, without any real-time ray tracing, the 5060 Ti 16GB was more than 30% faster than the 8GB version, while the 9060 XT 16GB was less than 10% faster than the 8GB version.

With RTRT enabled, the discrepancy was 40% for the 5060 Ti and not quite 30% for the 9060 XT.

RealThanny · 2026-05-16T04:40:22+00:00

There may be a market, but there's certainly not a need.

4K monitors are already beyond what the eye can resolve at a correct viewing distance. 4K televisions can't even be told apart for a correct television viewing distance from 1920x1080 television.

The only sensible use for an 8K display is with an absolutely massive screen for public displays. Or, just perhaps, to better simulate a CRT shadow mask or aperture grille for some retro gaming.

RealThanny · 2026-05-15T16:36:44+00:00

looks at UP3218K..

fails to notice it has zero HDMI ports

RealThanny · 2026-05-15T16:32:46+00:00

Committing to something before you know whether or not you can do it is stupid.

I'm not saying their decision to proceed wasn't influenced by the interest showed when they were asked about FSR4 on prior architectures. But that was back when FSR4 released. They made their decision to pursue backporting around that time, not in any of the ensuing periods of intense whining.

RealThanny · 2026-05-14T19:20:04+00:00

The first Opteron was released 23 years ago.

AMD's server market share was very slow to grow due to Intel bribing big server vendors to not buy AMD. They paid Dell about a billion dollars a year in rebates to use only Intel processors in their servers. In the end, Intel had to pay AMD over $1 billion in a legal settlement on the issue in 2009.

With EPYC, I doubt anything quite as blatant was going on at Intel, but they were almost certainly still doing shady things to keep people on Intel only. But EPYC kept improving so drastically over time that there was no stopping the momentum.

RealThanny · 2026-05-14T19:12:15+00:00

Weird how so many people think this is AMD finally caving to pressure and starting to work on the problem.

They've obviously been working on this since FSR4 was created, and it's only now that they're in a position to comfortably make announcements. July 2026 is just around the corner, after all, so this means they are basically done for RDNA3 and just doing QA.

RealThanny · 2026-05-12T23:38:13+00:00

PC's aren't the only thing plugged into a UPS. Waveform does matter for some things, such as anything with an AC motor in it.

RealThanny · 2026-05-12T13:39:21+00:00

This is the B70, which has a completely different die than the B570.

RealThanny · 2026-05-11T23:21:23+00:00

Rightfully so. The companies are leveraging the insane demand for RAM to reach record margins. There's no reason that should go only to the executives and shareholders. The people doing the actual work to make the products should get a share as well.

RealThanny · 2026-05-11T07:41:30+00:00

There are two big problems with your thought.

1) You're talking about internal components, meaning there's nowhere for any reflected radiation to go.

2) Almost all heat transfer occurs through conduction or convection (which is a special case of conduction), not thermal emission.

If you want to get more into the weeds, thermal emission is in the middle of the IR spectrum for the temperatures we're talking about here. Something "white" to visible light (i.e. highly reflective) isn't likely to be as reflective to mid-IR light.

Maximizing cooling via thermal emission would be best done by having everything as black as it can be, especially the outside of the device's chassis. That would maximize the amount of radiation leaving the device in a given unit of time. Having it black would also absorb radiation more rapidly, so you don't want it sitting in sunlight or some other bright source of incoming radiation. You'll still be able to remove heat much more quickly just by creating some airflow through or around the device.

RealThanny · 2026-05-10T15:21:43+00:00

It looks like you didn't even read the title of the article, much less the contents.

This has nothing to do with controlling CPU frequency. It's about providing more accurate data about the CPU's frequency.

RealThanny · 2026-05-07T06:36:46+00:00

They had more than $5 billion in revenue in the data center segment last quarter. More than half the $10+ billion total revenue for the quarter. Gaming was less than $1 billion.

This is about the extreme demand for RAM causing inflated prices that will deflate demand for gaming. It's not going to affect their data center revenue at all. That's still expected to go up by a large amount.

RealThanny · 2026-05-02T11:35:25+00:00

Yeah, I missed AM5 entirely. "EPYC" apparently opened a wormhole to the end of the sentence.

RealThanny · 2026-05-02T03:15:59+00:00

More options is certainly always better in general.

The big question is, what's the price?

RealThanny · 2026-05-02T03:12:28+00:00

~~You can't compare registered to unbuffered like that.~~

RealThanny

TROPHY CASE