Working as a developer relations manager at AMD means I wear a lot of hats. One of my favorite parts of the job is seeing customers experience the significant benefits of AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO and the transformative impact these workstation processors can have on a company’s business.
A case study between Sonos and AMD illustrates this point. Sonos has been a leader in wireless audio technology for decades, but staying at the top of the market requires a relentless commitment to innovation, including a willingness to switch solution providers when the advantages of doing so are compelling enough to warrant it. Sonos was initially interested in AMD because it had heard the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO processors powering solutions like the Lenovo P620 ThinkStation offered substantial performance gains compared to the systems it had previously deployed.
Initially, Sonos’ evaluation focused on the software side of the company. Once early trials saw compile times improve by more than 50 percent, other divisions registered their own interest. What began as a limited test run for Lenovo P620 workstations in one area of the company expanded into a system replacement cycle across most of Sonos, impacting workstation, desktop, and even laptop deployments. A rollout this comprehensive requires buy-in from across the company, including folks in the IT department, and it’s striking that Sonos saw such value in the transition.
"Some of the systems we used before were dual CPU systems," said Juan Garces, IT Support Engineer at Sonos. "The Lenovo P620 with a single AMD CPU has replaced them, with more performance and less cost. These workstations have blown us away and we have upgraded all our previous desktop configurations, from the low end to the high end."
"With the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO CPU-powered Lenovo workstation, the software and models load faster," says Nick Jones, Mechanical Engineer at Sonos. “I did a lot of simulations with Ansys®, and the new AMD CPU-powered workstation was 20 to 30 percent faster when I benchmarked some CAD models. On an eight-hour model, that’s a huge amount of time saved to cut it down to six hours."
But it's not just the hours that matter – minutes and seconds matter, too. Many rendering applications include both a viewport for seeing changes to a model quickly as well as a more fully realized render option that can take several hours to produce a result. Moving to higher-clocked, more efficient workstation processors compared to the systems they had been using paid significant dividends for Sonos' engineering teams, improving the amount of time the mechanical engineering team could spend on product updates, as opposed to waiting for the results of those updates to appear on-screen.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors enable the with world-class security features, enterprise-grade stability, and uncompromising performance. AMD Threadripper PRO is additionally supported by AMD’s full suite of PRO Technologies, which includes AMD PRO Business Ready and Manageability features that provide continuous validation, seamless deployment, and cloud management capabilities. Or, in Sonos’ engineer Juan Garces’ own words: “My advice to anyone contemplating the switch to AMD CPUs is buy one yesterday. It is a no-brainer. AMD has no competition now.”