AMD unveils Threadripper Halo Station, an AI workstation packing 96 cores

25 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by Levitating
(tomshardware.com)

6 Comments

Tsiklon

4 hours ago

This looks like a very cool high end x86 workstation. CPU alone is $12000 retail.

Theres a few potential “problems” I see with it - main system RAM is about 30-40x slower than that of the GPU’s and you will have PCI-e as a bottleneck getting working data to or between the GPUs.

In practice is the 400-500GB/s main memory limiting some use cases, or is the PCI-E bus the main issue with these types of systems?

kimixa

an hour ago

Realistically the models will always be resident in the GPU during processing - the CPU and it's memory would probably more be used for related development tasks (as this is a workstation not a cloud server).

If it's just running the same model all day that CPU and it's RAM would be pretty wasted.

Neywiny

5 hours ago

So there's a path to 4 in order to run trillion parameter models? But you can't buy them or fit them in the case? Maybe in the Halo 2...

That all said, running frontier models locally offline would be very nice

ilaksh

4 hours ago

It's over $100k.

Neywiny

3 hours ago

Cheaper than an entry level human. But I've never used a model that size for development so idk if they could replace it. The work I do with even nemotron 550b, it's so dumb it's infuriating. Same with the free Google one (for anything sanitized/generic)