What is HEDT? It’s an acronym for High End Desktop, used to describe that gray area between consumer processors and true workstation chips where both Intel and AMD have had success over the past decade or so. But is HEDT still even a thing? Read on to find out.
A little HEDT History
Though higher-powered processors certainly were around prior, I’d argue that the HEDT category didn’t exist in any real way until 2007/2008 when Intel’s Core X “Extreme” processors took the newly minted prospect of multi-core CPUs and cranked it up. With Core X, Intel quickly carved out a new niche in the market – one that thirsted for the higher core counts, higher core frequencies, greater RAM densities, and PCI (later PCIe) lanes that these processors could support. For years, Intel owned this market.
Then in 2017, AMD entered the HEDT foray in a big way with the release of Threadripper. Though the initial Threadripper processors maxed out at 12 cores, that count soon grew in subsequent releases up to 64 cores, quickly making AMD the smart choice for HEDT builds and garnering significant market share within this subcategory of PCs.
Over the past 3 or 4 years though, availably of HEDT processors has shrunk, squeezed out by consumer chips with higher and higher core counts on the low end and enterprise solutions with high margins for chip makers on the upper end. For both Intel and AMD, there’s a finite amount of production resources and silicon to go around, and so despite obvious advantages to this type of platform for many user types, the opportunity costs to continue the category have simply outweighed the potential market demand. HEDT processor releases became less frequent, and subsequently, popularity waned. Third gen Threadripper was the last non-Pro version and Intel’s latest Core X was 10th Gen on X299 in 2019.
And so it seemed, at least until recently, that the HEDT may be dead.
Threadripper TRX50 – Return of the HEDT?!
But alas, with the release of AMD’s latest Threadripper, it seems that news of HEDT’s death may have been greatly exaggerated. As we’ve discussed previously, Threadripper 7000 comes in two types – one being the decidedly workstation centric WRX90 Pro platform, but the other a non Pro CPU using the TRX50 chipset which supports up to 64 cores, 48 PCIe Gen 5 lanes, and super high RAM density, which can really only be reasonably classified as serving the high end desktop space – an HEDT.
Now whether Threadripper 7000 constitutes an actual resurgence of the category or is its final death rattle before becoming history remains to be seen. But if early interest in the Threadripper 7000 platform is any indication, I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of HEDT as a desktop category.
Configure your Threadripper 7000 powered HEDT right here.
Josh Covington
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