AMD has announced a slew of new products in their Threadripper lines, much to the delight of system builders, overclockers and other enthusiasts. These two new CPUs cap off the Zen-2 powered offerings from the red team, showing off higher core counts and high speeds. And of course, they have a pretty high price tag. The company also revealed a new entry-level Athlon processor with integrated Radeon Vega 3 graphics.
The 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 3970X will cost $1,999 and the 24-core Ryzen Threadripper 3960X will cost $1,399. Performance for these new 7nm chips is pretty stellar, with base clock speeds for the Threadripper 3970X and 3960X are 3.7GHz and 3.8GHz respectively. Turbo boost speeds of up to 4.5GHz are being marketed by AMD, although as for overclocking potential, we will have to wait and see how the benchmarks go. Both models feature multi-threading, with up to 64 and 48 threads respectively. 128MB of L3 cache and 280W TDP figures are the same across both chips.
The new Athlon APU model will begin selling on November 19th and will retail for $49. This older setup uses the previous-gen 12nm Zen+ architecture and has just two cores with multi-threading. Speeds are locked at 3.5 GHz. The latter of these three is perfect for integrated system builders looking for a low-power solution for specific tasks. Expect to see OEMs making use of these weaker chips in small form-factor prebuilts soon.
We don’t have news about hardware compatibility for the higher end Threadrippers, but AMD has also introduced the new sTRX4 socket which will work with the new top tier processors. There will also be motherboard brands and pricing revealed soon, as soon as AMD begins rolling the production lines with board partners. The Socket sTRX4 interface breaks compatibility with previous-gen Threadripper CPUs, but there is a positive, in that the new socket can support up to 64 PCIe lanes at once, opening the door for improved graphical loads.
Being that these are Threadrippers CPUs, don’t expect to use these for gaming. You can get far better performance per dollar from cheaper options. The high thread counts here are meant exclusively for professional workstation users who need to handle high-intensity loads for long periods of time. Some people are still hoping for AMD to reveal the long-awaited 64-core Threadripper variants, but no such news has been confirmed.
