System76 Thelio Major Powered By AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series Performance

I've only had the new System76 Thelio Major for a couple days and thus a very preliminary review today and a larger more comprehensive test set will come in a follow-up article. But already the System76 Thelio Major has proven mighty capable across a wide range of AI, HPC, code compilation, and other creator workloads.

For today's testing the System76 Thelio Major with Threadripper 7980X was compared to the previously-reviewed System76 Thelio Major with Threadripper 3990X from just four years ago... While at the same 64 core / 128 thread count, the upgrade from this Zen 2 Threadripper to now Zen 4 already ia quite an upgrade if yourself or business typically is upgrading workstations on a 3~5 year cycle.

In addition to the 4 year comparison of AMD Ryzen Threadripper performance in the System76 Thelio space, I also compared the Thelio Major's performance to my own DIY build of the Threadripper 7980X. This was principally using components from the AMD review kit for the Threadripper 7000 series launch including the Threadrippper 7980X, 4 x 32GB GSKILL F5-6400R3239G32GQ (DDR5-6400 EXPO memory used; contrary to the automated system table based on DMI information) and ASUS PRO WS TRX50-SAGE WiFi motherboard. The DIY build was running within a SilverStone RM51 5U server chassis. Also note with the system table the extremely high CPU frequencies being reported as the clock frequencies are a bug that I made AMD aware of some weeks ago and are currently working on a fix that will be published soon. All of these CPUs were running at stock frequencies.

One difference to note is that the System76 Thelio Major is currently opting to only offer DDR5-4800 memory with their new Threadripper systems rather than DDR5-5200 rated or any DDR5-6000+ EXPO memory configurations. They continue to evaluate memory options and in a separate Phoronix article I've been meaning to showcase some of the memory performance differences on Zen 4 Threadripper.

All three systems for today's article were freshly tested on the latest Pop!_OS 22.04 release using the Linux 6.6.6 kernel and its other stock components/versions at the time of testing.

In addition to looking at the raw performance for these three systems for today's testing, the CPU power consumption was monitored via the RAPL interfaces as well as comparing the CPU core temperature and CPU peak clock frequencies being achieved on each of these Linux workstations.

Let's move on to this fresh benchmarking.