The opening keynote at IFA 2026 was held by AMD and our team on the ground was there to see it. During the event, AMD announced the Threadripper Halo Station, a liquid-cooled workstation built around the 96-core Threadripper PRO 9995WX CPU codenamed "Shimada Peak" and up to four AMD Instinct MI350P accelerators. The system is designed around one specific use case: run AI models with more than one trillion parameters locally, without a cloud connection. Jack Huynh, AMD's SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics, described it as a new class of workstation bringing supercomputer-class compute to individual users and developers. The Threadripper PRO 9995WX Zen 5 CPU has 96 cores and 192 threads, 5,4 GHz boost frequency and supports up to 2 TB of DDR5 system memory.

Going further down the specifications, each MI350P card features 144 GB of HBM3E running at 4 TB/s, offering a bandwidth 14 times higher than any LPDDR5X variant. At IFA 2026, AMD presented a configuration based on two MI350P PCIe cards for a total of 288 GB of HBM3E memory. Users can upgrade the system to four cards and 576 GB of HBM3E. This amount of accelerator memory is enough, says AMD, to hold a trillion-parameter model entirely on-device. Each Instinct MI350P card has a TBP of up to 600 W and is liquid-cooled independently, as is the CPU. Complete system specifications, availability and pricing have not been announced.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX HEDT processor with 96 cores and 192 threads comes with a default TDP of 350 W. However, heavy overclocking can bring the CPU to 1,300 W and requires a custom integrated heat spreader (IHS) that serves as a direct-die waterblock. In the latest endeavor by Geekerwan, the enthusiast created a custom fin structure inside the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX IHS that serves as a direct-die waterblock to achieve an impressive overclock of 5.325 GHz, drawing an astonishing 1,340 W during load, with the entire system drawing around 1,700 W. According to Geekerwan, he contacted ASUS China regional manager Tony Yu to experiment with different IHS designs before "ruining" the IHS of a $12,000 HEDT CPU. He then proceeded with trying a straight fin structure common in commercial waterblocks, but also conducted computer simulations that showed a curved, wavy S-shaped fin structure is the most efficient in capturing heat, as the coolant flows over a longer distance with minimal obstruction, resulting in 20% better cooling than the straight fin structure.

The IHS of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX processor is 4.1 mm thick, which left Geekerwan with about 2.0 mm of fin depth and about 2.1 mm for the structural integrity of the IHS, which is subject to a lot of water pressure. After a heavy 19-hour session of CNC milling, the result is a CPU that ran between 30-50°C, which is an amazing temperature under Cinebench 2026 load. The system also placed 7th in Cinebench R23, just behind an LN2-cooled AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX running at 6.2 GHz. Impressive heat dissipation and the massive 5.325 GHz clock on a 96-core system are also made possible with an industrial chiller, two Bosch water pumps from cars, and a 37-gallon water tank. You can check out the entire process below.

A month ago, AMD launched the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9000 WX-Series of processors, but at the time, the company didn't provide any pricing. Today, in a blog post, the company revealed the pricing for five of the six new Threadripper processors, skipping the 12-core 9945WX for some reason. As these are workstation chips with up to 96 cores, pricing is accordingly high, with the 16-core 9955WX coming in at US$1,649. The 24-core 9965WX comes in at US$2,899, followed by the 32-core 9975WX at US$4,099. Things start to get really eye watering with the 64-core 9985WX at US$7,999 and finally the 96-core 9995WX at US$11,699.

In all fairness, the per core cost actually gets a lot lower with the two high-end parts, but it's pretty clear that these 350 W TDP chips are not intended for consumer use. AMD also added some new benchmark figures, comparing the 9995WX with Intel's Xeon W9-3595X. AMD claims to best it by between 40 and 145 percent, depending on the benchmark in question. It's a bit of an unfair comparison though, as the W9-3595X is only a 60-core CPU that has an MSRP of US$5,889, but Intel doesn't have any higher-end options in its workstation lineup either. It would've made more sense to put the W9-3595X up against the 9985WX though, as the two are closer both in terms of core count and price point.