Other than competitive performance, the AMD Threadripper’s appeal to most consumer lies in its massive 64-lane high-speed IO. In comparison, Intel’s HEDT line has a limited PCIe lane count to the CPU. The more affordable Intel HEDT processors have much less than the more expensive high-end models as well. AMD on the other hand has all 64 PCIe lanes available for every single one of their Ryzen Threadripper CPUs. This opens up the platform as a more flexible configuration whether it is for gaming, render farms or for research. However, one missing feature has been bugging many enthusiasts, that is thankfully now going to be fixed.
AMD Threadripper Gets Bootable NVMe RAID
With all those PCIe lanes, it only makes sense to allow multiple NVMe storage devices. Unfortunately upon its release, AMD’s X399 is not capable of NVMe RAID, essentially making motherboards with multiple M.2 slots non-sensical. The good news is that together with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X, AMD is also announcing that they are working on making bootable NVMe RAID possible on this new platform. The promise is by September 25 and should open up the X399 platform to those seeking fast storage performance. Storage after all is a performance bottleneck that many overlook, and should go well when paired with mutli-GPU configurations.
The best part is that it will be completely free. No extra cost. Zip. Zilch. Nada. It is just a matter of waiting, since it is about a month away from release.
