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Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021
- AMD Opens Up Threadripper Pro: Three New WRX80 Motherboards
- Hands-On with the ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi
- 64 Cores of Rendering Madness: The AMD Threadripper Pro 3995WX Review
- Lenovo ThinkStation P620 Review: A Vehicle for Threadripper Pro
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| 8:00a | Crucial X6 Portable SSD 4TB Launches at $490: Phison's U17 Flash Controller Enters Retail
Crucial introduced the X6 Portable SSD last year as an entry-level alternative to their NVMe-based X8 Portable SSD. Launched in capacities of up to 2TB, the X6 adopted a 96L 3D TLC version of the BX500 SATA SSD along with an ASMedia ASM235CM SATA to USB 3.2 Gen 1 bridge chip. Today, the company is launching a unique high-performance product in the external SSD space within the same X6 family. Direct flash-to-USB controllers have traditionally been used only in thumb drives, where compactness is the primary feature. These controllers present a number of advantages including significant reduction in bill-of-materials (BOM) cost and overall device power consumption. However, such controllers have typically been restricted to speeds of around 400MBps. Taking advantage of the USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Gen 2x2 interfaces, Phison introduced a couple of high-speed flash controllers with a direct USB interface at CES 2021. The U17, sporting a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) upstream interface and a 2-channel 1200 MT/s downstream NAND interface, is the one on which Crucial's Portable SSD 4TB is based.
Crucial claims speeds of up to 800MBps for both reads and writes. This is significantly higher than the 540 MBps numbers possible with the SATA-based external SSDs. Officially, the X6 drives have 'Micron 3D NAND' and there is no specification of the generation / layer count. However, Crucial indicated that the X6 4TB drives being shipped today come with 96L Micron 3D NAND (QLC). As is usual with Micron / Crucial, it is likely that the NAND generation may get updated in the future to allow Micron to offer even lower price points. The new 4TB X6 Portable SSD is priced at $490. At this price point, it compares quite favorably with the other QLC-based external SSDs such as the Sabrent XTRM-Q (though the latter comes with a Thunderbolt interface). The other 4TB external SSDs in the market are from Western Digital, with prices ranging from $680 to $750. Given their 3D TLC flash and the usage of a NVMe drive behind a bridge chip, they can offer much better performance, endurance, and additional flexibility (such as the ability to salvage the internal SSD in the case of a bridge chip failure) for professional use-cases. However, for the average consumer, the price per GB as well as price to performance ratio are both in Crucial's favor with the new X6 Portable SSD based on the Phison U17 controller. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 9:00a | The Intel Moonshot Division: An Interview with Dr. Richard Uhlig of Intel Labs Some analysts consider Intel to be a processor company with manufacturing facilities – others consider it to be a manufacturing company that just happens to make processors. In the grand scheme of things, Intel is a hybrid of product, manufacturing, expertise, investment, and perhaps most importantly, research. Intel has a lot of research and development on its books, most of it aimed at current product cycles in the 12-36 month time span, but beyond that, as with most big engineering companies, there’s a team of people dedicated to finding the next big thing over 10-20+ years. This is usually called the Moonshot Division in most companies, but here we find it called Intel Labs, and leading this team of path-finding gurus is Dr. Richard Uhlig. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 9:30a | AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro: Retail Offering Starts Today
Today AMD is officially going to start offering its Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors at retail, effectively ending the exclusivity deal with Lenovo on the product line. To date, Lenovo is the only company to have offered Threadripper Pro in the Thinkstation P620 platform. In the past few months, beginning with the CES trade show, we have seen three motherboard manufacturers showcase models of compatible motherboards for the retail market, and today is supposed to be the day that systems with those motherboards can be purchased. At the launch of the Threadripper Pro platform, AMD advertised four different models from 12 cores up to 64 cores, built upon its Zen 2 architecture and mirroring the Threadripper 3000 family of hardware. The Pro element is an upgrade, giving the processor eight memory channels rather than four, support for 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, support for up to 2 TB of ECC memory per CPU, and Pro-level admin tools. In essence, sometimes it is easier to think of Threadripper Pro more as ‘Workstation EPYC’, as these new processors are aimed at the traditional workstation crowd.
Out of the four processors, only three are being made at retail – that final 12-core processor is going to remain for specific OEM projects only. Pricing for these units is also being announced today, with the 64-core model sitting at $5490, the 32-core model at $2750, and the 16-core model at $1150.
These prices are larger than the equivalent Threadripper processors by up to 40%, despite our benchmarks showing the difference between the 64-core parts actually around 3% on average. This is because of all the extra features that Threadripper Pro brings to the table. Motherboards from three manufacturers will be made available: the Supermicro M12SWA-TF, the GIGABYTE WRX80-SU8-IPMI, and the ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi. Prices for these motherboards are currently unknown, however we did have a short hands on with the ASUS motherboard which you can find in the link below.
We have already reviewed both the Threadripper Pro 3995WX and the Lenovo ThinkStation P620, which you can find here: Exactly where and when these CPUs will start at the usual retail places is unclear - we do know that system integrators have been developing configurations with the hardware for several weeks now, so we might see these parts first hit the pre-built area before going fully retail. We are hoping to get review units for the other CPUs in later this month, along with a few of these motherboards.
Update 1: Scan in the UK is currently selling the 64-core (£5000) and 32-core (£2500), with the 16-core (£1050) on preorder. They also have the ASUS motherboard for sale for £890. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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