If you were waiting for a price drop before upgrading, now appears to be a good time since AMD's flagship Threadripper 1950X CPU has gotten a price drop of $120 (update: Amazon prices are fluctuating, meanwhile you can try Newegg.) Considering how it is already insane value (Intel's 16-Core retails for around 80% more) this is the perfect opportunity to get in an upgrade this holiday.
AMD's HEDT 16-Core / 32 Thread 'Threadripper 1950X' Gets Price Slashed to $879 on Amazon and Newegg
The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is the flagship chip of the Threadripper X399 family. The chip features 16 cores, 32 threads. Clocks are maintained at 3.4 GHz base, 4.0 GHz boost and the XFR technology should help it gain. The chip will carry 32 MB of L3 cache and 8 MB of L2 cache which totals 40 MB. There will be a total of 64 PCIe lanes available on the processor of which 60 can be used by discrete graphics cards and PCIe NVMe storage devices. The chip will cost $999 US when launched.
- – 16 cores / 32 threads
- – 3.4 GHz base and 4.0 GHz precision boost clocks
- – Support for 64 PCIe lanes
- – Unlocked for overclocking
In terms of performance, we have already seen ones from AMD during the Ryzen Threadripper announcement but it’s good to see benchmarks from independent reviewers. Hothardware's system yielded a score of 2905 points in the multi-threaded test which is reported to be 30% faster than the similarly priced Core i9-7900X. The Intel Core i9-7900X is a 10 core processor which costs $999 US while the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, costing the same, features 16 cores which makes it a very disruptive offering for mega-tasking workloads.
The Threadripper and Whitehaven X399 platform is something that will build upon the disruption that Ryzen has brought and will continue to upset the x86 paradigm that we had been observing for so long (with Intel being the only real option for performance conscious buyers). As I mentioned in my initial article a long time back, AMD has called check and Intel seems to slow to respond. Whether or not Threadripper is able to beat Intel offerings core-for-core or clock-for-clock is irrelevant – they will knock out the competition where it actually matters: Perf-Per-$.
This is very good news for any tech enthusiast waiting to go with a Ryzen/Threadripper build. Ryzen is not only going to be a game changer for the company in terms of its profitability (in the long run) but also a status quo shattering product for the x86 industry at large. Keep in mind however, that caution is advised as far as raw gaming performance is concerned. Games usually are not capable of utilizing a lot of threads and instead rely on high clock rates, but applications like server/enterprise and rendering farms however are going to benefit from the arrival of Ryzen a lot. That is the industry where it is truly going to be a game changer, providing Intel-level performance at 1/2-1/3 the cost.
