Four new chips will make up the second generation of AMD’s immensely powerful Threadripper lineup. The top two, with 24 or 32 cores, dare you to find a multi-threaded workload they can’t swallow whole.
Almost exactly a year after its first Ryzen Threadripper processors burst into the somewhat stagnant market for high-performance desktop (HEDT) consumer CPUs, AMD is poised to give gamers, multimedia pros, and other bleeding edge-dwellers four new Threadripper chips with even better potential performance—and higher price tags on the peak models.
The 2990WX will set you back a cool $1,799, nearly double the price of the previous-generation 1950X flagship.
The only consumer-grade CPU that comes close to the Threadripper 2990WX’s capabilities on paper is Intel’s Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition. That’s a $1,999 chip with 18 cores and 36 threads.
Intel’s comparable offering to the 2950X is the $999 Core i9-7900X. It’s got 10 cores, 20 threads, and a 3.3GHz clock, offering excellent single-threaded performance of the type that’s critical to running many demanding games at maximum frame rates. Interestingly, AMD ran a series of 11 games on PCs powered by both chips, and found that the system with the Core i9-7900X offered about 6 percent higher frame rates on average than the Threadripper-powered one did. That would be closing the deficit with last year’s models.
Part of the performance difference depends on how the game harnesses CPU power, as well as whether you’re running it in 1080p or 4K. We’re eager to put all of this to the test to verify AMD’s preliminary results in our forthcoming full review of the Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, which AMD plans to start shipping on Aug. 31.
In addition to the Threadripper 2950X, AMD is also releasing a cheaper Ryzen Threadripper 2920X in October, with 12 cores and 24 threads, for $649.
All four of the second-generation Threadripper chips are based on the existing Zen architecture, which also is the foundation for AMD’s mainstream Ryzen chips and its server and enterprise-class EPYC CPUs. All of the Threadripper chips also use the existing TR4 motherboard socket, which means they’ll fit into any existing X399-chipset Threadripper motherboard on the market with a BIOS update. (All of these boards, according to AMD, should be flash-upgradable, so having an existing Threadripper chip should not be necessary to perform the BIOS update.) Existing coolers and power supplies will work as well, AMD said.
However, if you are planning on overclocking your new Threadripper (like all of AMD’s Ryzen chips, they’re all unlocked and practically begging to run faster), you might want to invest in new PC guts to go along with it, because overclocking a 32-core chip will generate immense amounts of heat and consume heaps of power. The WX chips are designed for 250 watts, up from 180 watts for the first-gen Threadripper chips. The new X chips continue to consume 180 watts. Existing boards should be able to handle the load of the new WX chips, however.
Look out for more Threadripper coverage soon as we put the 16-core 2950X version to the test in the coming days.
