Threadripper Pro Goes Gaming With Nvidia's RTX 3080 Cloud Gaming Plan
1440p, 120 FPS gaming with a "workstation" CPU
Hot on the heels of Nvidia's new RTX 3080 Cloud Gaming announcement, AMD has revealed that its Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors will be powering Nvidia's new RTX 3080 Superpods. Threadripper Pro will give Nvidia the CPU horsepower and PCIe bandwidth it needs to help drive the 39,200 TFLOPS of gaming performance each Superpod server will provide.
AMD did not specify which Threadripper Pro CPUs would be used in Nvidia's Superpods, however, we assume the servers will be equipped with AMD's latest Threadripper Pro products based on the Zen 2 architecture. AMD's Zen 3 based Threadripper CPUs are still in development.
“The Ryzen Threadripper Pro lineup was designed to offer users incredible performance and unrivaled bandwidth and sets the industry standard for extreme computing performance across a range of use cases, including the rapidly-growing cloud gaming space,” said Chris Kilburn, corporate vice president and general manager of the client component business at AMD said in a statement. “Working with Nvidia, it is clear that the expansive feature set of Ryzen Threadripper Pro is the perfect platform to power their next-generation cloud gaming experience.”
Despite being an architecture behind, the current Zen 2 Threadripper products are no slouch, and still one of the best CPUs for heavy multi-core workloads. The top tier 3995WX comes with 64 cores, 128 threads, and a clock speed of up to 4.2GHz, along with 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 4 bandwidth and 8 memory channels. The 128 lanes and 8 memory channels, in particular, is a trait found in all Zen 2 Threadripper processors.
The vast amount of memory and PCIe bandwidth will arguably be the more important features for Nvidia's Superpods. With all that bandwidth, Nvidia can power multiple RTX 3080 virtual machines off of one Threadripper CPU without sacrificing memory or PCIe bandwidth.
With further optimizations from Nvidia, we expect the Threadripper Pro CPUs to perform even better to ensure each cloud gaming server meets the 120 fps target consistently.
Nvidia's new RTX 3080 cloud gaming plan will start at $99.99 once released and give you the best cloud gaming experience Nvidia can provide right now. Each gaming instance will come with RTX 3080 graphics and run at a very low latency of 56 ms at 120 fps. Plus, there are more benefits like built-in G-Sync support (tusable on static refresh rate displays) and 1440P support.
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Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.