AMD has been a busy company recently. The stellar launch of Ryzen 7, 5 and 3 series CPUs has brought them back into the consumer CPU market again and now they are aiming for the HEDT platform, a market that has been primarily never seen AMD competition. AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper chips could very well be the most powerful consumer CPU ever introduced when it releases in August. With up to 16 cores and 32 threads, Threadripper gives the high-performance Intel products currently dominating high-end desktops something to worry about.
The specs
- The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X ($999 on Amazon) features 16 cores with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) for 32 threads of compute power. The base clock speed of the chip is 3.4GHz, with a 4GHz boost speed.
- The Ryzen Threadripper 1920X ($799 on Amazon) will feature 12 cores with SMT for 24 threads of compute power. The base clock speed of the chip is 3.5GHz with a 4GHz boost speed.
- The Ryzen Threadripper 1900X will feature 8 cores with SMT for 16 threads of compute power, similar to the Ryzen 7 1800X but slotting into more capable X399 motherboards. The 1900X’s base clock speed is 3.8GHz with a 4GHz boost speed.
- All Threadripper chips pack a whopping 64 PCI-E lanes
- Memory: Quad-channel DDR4
- Platform: X399 with a new TR4 socket that is incompatible with existing Ryzen chips.
- All chips are unlocked for overclocking adventures.
- Can’t be “delided” easily as it uses a solder thermal interface material.
- Release date: Threadripper PCs will be available for sale on July 27. The Threadripper 1950X and 1920X CPUs will launch on August 10, with the 1900X releasing on August 31.
- Alienware has the worldwide exclusive on Threadripper systems among large PC manufacturers, but many U.S. boutique builders will offer it as well.
- Both parts will be 180-watt TDP chips.
- Ryzen Threadripper CPUs will support up to 1TB of RAM when 128GB LR-DIMMs are used.
- Threadripper will not ship with an included liquid-cooled cooler as has been rumoured. It will include a bracket adapter that works with most liquid coolers.
Release dates
Online retailers will be taking pre-orders for the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X and Ryzen Threadripper 1950X on July 31 ahead of August 10 retail availability.
X399 chipset and other specs
At Computex, AMD revealed that all Threadripper CPUs will feature 64 PCI-E lanes and quad-channel RAM support on the X399 chipset, but other hard details of the chipset aren’t known.
Threadripper is also AMD’s first consumer chip to move away from the older pin grid array (PGA) design to the same land grid array (LGA) as Intel’s chips. In other words, Threadripper’s pins are in the motherboard socket, not on the chip itself.
The other detail AMD slipped out is what the maximum thermal budget is for the chip and it’s a doozy. The company said both chips have a TDP of 180 watts vs the Core i9 7900X’s 140 watt TDP.
Before you scream that it’ll be too hot to cool, one thing you remember is that Intel and AMD haven’t always used the same definition of what a Thermal Design Point is. Intel’s Core i9 is also getting a pretty bad reputation for being too hot to handle as it is.
Even more insane is this fact: The 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X’s 180 watt TDP is still 40 watts less than the AMD 8-core FX 9590 CPU which had a 220 watt TDP.
