Rumor mill: AMD's top-secret Threadripper launch plans have been leaked by Videocardz: on November 5, AMD will announce the 3960X and 3970X with their accompanying TRX40 motherboards, and two weeks later they'll arrive in-store. The mysterious 3990X will get a mention but won't be fully revealed until January 2020.

Though Videocardz couldn't catch any new details about the chips, we can piece together plenty from recent leaks. On Tuesday, Komachi found a product list confirming 24-core and 32-core Threadripper processors, the former of which Apisak assigned the 3960X title on Wednesday, making the 3970X the 32-core monster. It'll perform well, too, if an engineering sample Geekbench run is to be believed.

The 3990X remains a little more mysterious. As the Threadripper lineup generally mirrors the Epyc series, which now includes 48-core and 64-core parts, it seems likely the 3990X is one of these. One scenario is that it's a 64-core chip and a 48-core 3980X might get announced later, or alternatively, AMD is saving 64 cores for the server market and is capping Threadripper with a 48-core 3990X.

Though it would be uncharacteristic of AMD not to push their lead, they've likely won the high-end desktop (HEDT) market with November's schedule. Intel's newly announced Cascade Lake-X HEDT processors stretch from 10-cores at $590 to 18-cores for $979, with 10% performance boosts over last-gen to match. On the opposite side, AMD's 12-core 3900X is only $500 and the soon-to-be-released 16-core 3950X will be $750. With the improvements of Zen 2 AMD almost matches Intel on a per-core basis in relevant workloads.

Throw in 24-cores and 32-cores and Intel's 18-cores should be edged out in performance (though may present better value). With 48-cores and 64-cores, what is AMD even competing against?