AMD shared a number of new CPU details today, including its plans for Ryzen 3, a new 12-core Threadripper option, …
AMD released a number of announcements about Threadripper as the product moves towards production. First, the company reaffirmed that Threadripper, with its 16-core/32-thread CPU, will launch in early August, though an exact date has not been given. But we do have some new information about speeds, pricing, and configuration options.
First up, the Threadripper 1950X (16-core) will have a base clock of 3.4GHz and can boost up to 4GHz. How well (and for how long) it can hold its boost clocks will have some significant impact on how it performs. But it should do well in games and avoid clock drops that could penalize its performance compared with Ryzen 7 1800X. Second, AMD is prepping a new, 12-core/24-thread chip, dubbed the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X. This new chip will have a base clock of 3.5GHz and the same 4GHz top-end frequency.
The Threadripper 1950X will sell for $1,000, while the Threadripper 1920X is $800. Divide out the pricing by the core counts, and the curve is fairly consistent. The Ryzen 7 1800X is $500 for eight cores ($62.50 per core) , the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X is $800 for 12 cores ($66.67 per core) and the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is $1,000 for 16 cores, back to $62.50 per core. That still makes AMD a significantly less expensive option than Intel, core for core. Intel’s 16-core Core i9-7960X is supposed to sell for $1,700 when it launches later this year, while the 12-core Core i9-7920X is a $1,200 chip. At $1,000 and $800, Ryzen is still kicking the legs out from Intel’s official price structure.
How well performance scales from 8 to 16 cores will depend on a number of factors, so we aren’ t making any price-versus-performance predictions between Threadripper and Ryzen 7 yet. But the major server fight between Epyc and Skylake-SP that we covered earlier this week shows AMD has what it takes to hang with Intel, overall, even in major server benchmarks.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, there’s Ryzen 3. AMD already shared some details about its Ryzen 3 Pro processors earlier this summer, but this is the first time we’ ve heard mention of these parts in the consumer space. These new chips will be available on July 27 in the following configurations:
Ryzen 3 pricing hasn’ t been unveiled yet, but AMD hasn’ t been shy about slugging Intel where it hurts of late. We’ ll be curious to see how these chips compare with the Core i3, which has just two cores and four threads. What makes this so interesting is that AMD tends to gain much more from SMT than Intel does, and therefore compares best in SMT-enabled code. Intel also has Core i3 CPUs clocked significantly higher than AMD does, but AMD will have four full cores to work with. All in all, this should make for a very interesting comparison.
