Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today introduced a high-speed processor for enterprise workstations that it says can provide more performance than two Intel Corp. chips combined. 

The central processing unit, known as the 3995WX, is also touted as the first workstation processor to feature 64 cores. It’s part of a newly launched chip family called the Ryzen Threadripper Pro with which AMD is hoping to challenge Intel’s dominance in the professional-grade desktop market.

Modern workstations can run in the tens of thousands of dollars and are used to run complex software such as engineering applications. To meet those applications’ computational requirements, workstations often ship with two CPUs. The Ryzen Threadripper Pro only supports a single-CPU configuration, but AMD said that the series can nonetheless outperform the competition.

The chipmaker claims that a single 64-core 3995WX provides up to 27% better multithreaded performance than two high-end Xeon Platinum 8280 processors. In practice, AMD says this translates into higher speeds for more than 25 professional applications. It listed the Blender 3D modeling toolkit, SolidWorks engineering design application and Adobe Premiere Pro video editor among the applications that ran faster in internal tests.

The 3995WX runs at a 2.7-gigahertz base clock with top speeds of up to 4.2GHz. The three other CPUs that make up the Ryzen Threadripper Pro line have lower core counts ranging from 12 to 32, but higher base speeds that start at 3.5GHz.

Core counts are a key consideration for enterprises investing in workstations. Some enterprise software makers charge users according to the number of cores on which their software runs, which means it’s sometimes preferable to have fewer cores with higher frequencies. That’s the use case the three lower-end chips in the Ryzen Threadripper Pro address. 

Lenovo Group Ltd. is the first hardware maker that will make use of the new CPUs. The company today debuted a new workstation model called the ThinkStation P620 that combines a 64-core 3995WX with two Quadro RTX 8000 graphics cards from Nvidia Corp., up to a terabyte of memory and up to 20 terabytes of storage.

Besides the extra performance, AMD’s workstation CPUs also pack features to help information technology teams manage employee machines. Among those features is the company’s recently introduced Memory Guard technology. As the name suggests, it encrypts a computer’s memory to prevent the data inside from being compromised in the event hackers gain physical access to the machine and its memory chips.

Photo: AMD