Update July 13, 2017: The final pricing and specs have been officially announced for the $799 12-core, and $999 16-core, AMD Threadripper CPUs
C’mon, you don’t need a 16-core processor for your gaming rig, do you? Check out our pick of the best CPUs for gaming instead.
We posted a story this morning about a leaked press deck, which has now been confirmed by AMD themselves. The two Threadripper CPUs will be released in early August and will consist of the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and the 1920X.
The Threadripper 1950X is the 16-core / 32-thread part, with a base clockspeed of 3.4GHz and a boost clock of 4GHz. The Threadripper 1920X is a 12-core / 24-thread CPU with a base clockspeed of 3.5GHz and the same 4GHz boost clock.
AMD have also confirmed Alienware were a little premature when they announced the launch of their Threadripper-based Area-51 PC was goping to be July 27. That’s actually going to be the pre-order date, with shipping likely to follow the same early August timescale.
You will be able to get your hands on some new AMD silicon on July 27, however, as the budget-focused Ryzen 3 CPUs are going to actually be on the shelves that day. Intel had better watch out…
Original story July 13, 2017: The latest rumours, reportedly cribbed from a leakedAMD Threadripperpress deck, claims the top 16-core / 32-thread chip will start out costing $999.
You know how it goes, companies tease exciting new products then go silent about them so we have to subsist on rumour and speculation. But the latest pricing rumours about AMD’s Threadripper at least seem plausible, given they’re twice the original price of a single Ryzen 7 1800X, and the Threadripper 1950X will essentially be a pair of those octa-core chips ‘glued-together’ using AMD’s Infinity Fabric interconnect.
The R7 1800X originally retailed for $499, though it has recently dropped down in price, so you can now find AMD’s current top chip for a little more than $400. Threadripper will use a pair of the standard Ryzen cores to make the massively multicore processors in its range. Given the first Ryzen chips themselves contained a pair of quad-core modules connected via Infinity Fabric, that means the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X will be rocking four discrete modules to make up its 16-core design.
So, if the top-spec Threadripper is going to be $999, that by extension means there will also be a 16-core / 32-thread chip that costs less than that. The straight Ryzen Threadripper 1950 (without the ‘X’) is reportedly clocked 200MHz slower, but still has the same TDP and cache/core-count.
It’s also becoming clear that Intel is a little concerned about AMD’s entry into high-performance computing as highlighted by some of the trash-talking they’ve been doing about the red team’s Epyc server CPUs.
In a recent slide deck about Intel’s own new server parts they talk about AMD repurposing a desktop processor for servers as a negative and about their poor track record. Intel also point to ‘inconsistent performance from four glued-together desktop die.’ They go on to say the inconsistent performance stems from ‘higher latencies due to die-to-die interconnect’, essentially sticking the boot into AMD’s Infinity Fabric connection.
Intel also cite the Ryzen processors’ struggles with gaming performance, which have beenrectified by software optimisations in some instances. They’re trying to use this apples vs. oranges comparison to suggest the same will be true of the sorts of professional software run on servers… despite Ryzen actually performing remarkably well under such conditions.
All of this negative campaigning from Intel smacks of an undercurrent of fear around the big blue silicon-slinger. And that makes us think AMD really might be onto something with Threadripper, what do you think?