Editor’s Pick: Workstation Rips with Threadripper

Dear DE Reader:

NextComputing has just made its new Edge TR mid-size tower workstation available. They gave a sneak preview of it at AMD’s Ryzen PRO Global event in New York City at the end of August. Apparently, it was well received, and it’s obvious as to why. This baby is tuned for 3D CAD, rendering and simulation mavens as well as for developers of other demanding stuff like virtual reality and digital content creation.

For starters, the Edge TR is powered by AMD’s newest Ryzen Threadripper CPU, the 1950x. This 16-core CPU provides the Edge TR with 32 threads of simultaneous multiprocessing. Its typical speed is 3.4GHz, and it bursts up to 4GHz. When paired with AMD’s X399 chipset, you get approximately 40MB of combined cache. The X399 chipset also provides all kinds of I/O bandwidth, which should give you crazy good throughput.

The Edge TR mid-size tower workstation is built around the 16-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950x CPU, comes with 128GB of memory and supports as many as three dual-width graphics accelerators. Image courtesy of NextComputing.

Oh, and the Edge TR comes with 128GB of DDR4 (double data rate fourth generation) memory. Yes, I did say comes with.

Now, NextComputing provides turnkey solutions, so here’s where things get really interesting. For now, graphics is the focus. All sorts of solid-state and hard drive storage possibilities are available for the Edge TR. These are outlined in today’s main write-up.

Anyway, you can kit out the Edge TR with up to four single- or three dual-width graphics accelerator cards. But even if you opt for a single real-good graphics card, put it, the Ryzen Threadripper CPU, the memory, all that cache and I/O together and this system should, well, rip through most of what your applications throw at it today.

Those specs may leave you wondering if that horsepower is more than you need. I asked NextComputing why the Edge TR is for the 3D CAD/simulation crowd? Got an interesting response from Bob Labadini, NextComputing’s president and CTO.

You can read the full quote in today’s write-up, but the point he makes is that software grows faster than my gut. As soon as you have a workstation that can handle it, a new version appears and you’re stressing the hardware again. The Edge TR, which is fully upgradable, should start you ahead of the curve and enable you to keep up for a good long while. As Martha Stewart would say “that’s a good thing.”

Hit today’s Editor’s Pick of the Week write-up to learn more about the Edge TR. It sure sounds well worth a serious look.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, DE