One More Thing
AMD ended the keynote with one more product to show, another, new announcement, this time on the desktop side of things. AMD is announcing the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X HEDT processor in the desktop form factor. This has a whopping 64 cores / 128 threads based on the new Zen 2 cores at 7nm. It will have a base clock of 2.9GHz and a boost clock of 4.3GHz. It has a total cache of 288MB. Pricing will be $3,990 (cute) so it isn’t for mainstream, but at this pricing it is actually a lot cheaper than the competition and more powerful. This CPU will be available February 7th.
In order to achieve anything close to this on the competition you need dual-Xeon Platinum 8280 CPUs for a combined 56 core / 112 thread solution at $20,000. AMD can deliver more cores and threads in a single-CPU package at $3,990. This is going to be huge for professional content creators and anyone who needs highly threaded workloads of computation at a great value.
David’s Notes: In the past week or so, there have been leaks about the possibility of a 48 core/96 thread Threadripper. AMD flatly denied that to be a product on the market. We also asked about the possibility of a 16 core 3rd Generation Threadripper and they said not to expect them as the Ryzen 3950X already serves that market. In short, the minimum entry price to the AMD HEDT workspace went up since the most cost effective CPU is the 3960X.
Rounding out the presentation AMD summarized its leadership position for 2020 in the mobile space, the discrete GPU 1080p and 1440p gaming space, and the HEDT space and even the console gaming space.