Today we finally have AMD Ryzen Threadripper pricing as well as Ryzen 3 release windows. AMD Ryzen Threadripper has a good chance to be this year’s top high-end desktop CPU for those who are not already running Intel Xeon E5 machines. On the AMD Ryzen 3 side, AMD is going to bring a lot of performance to a segment that sorely needs it.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X
AMD Ryzen Threadripper will be available in “early August” says the company. The CPUs will utilize a new AMD Socket TR4, have quad channel DDR4, and feature 64 lanes of PCI Express. Essentially, AMD Threadripper is similar to AMD EPYC except that it has only two die onboard and higher clocks and therefore less load on the Infinity Fabric. There will be two models at launch:
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 16 core, 32 thread, 3.4 GHz base and 4.0GHz boost clocks. These will retail for $999
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X 12 core, 24 thread 3.5GHz and 4.0GHz boost clocks. These will retail for $799
That is great pricing and we expect excellent performance from AMD Ryzen Threadripper.
AMD told us “Both Ryzen Threadripper CPUs offer higher performance in Cinebench r15 than Intel 7900X, as demonstrated in the video. AMD is on track to launch Ryzen Threadripper CPUs and motherboards in early August…”
(Source: AMD Press Relations)
Unfortunately, AMD is still using Cinebench R15 as its primary comparison metric. During our Ryzen benchmarking as well as the video we did a few weeks ago using AMD EPYC with Cinebench, we discuss how Cinebench R15 is an absolutely perfect workload for AMD Zen architecture as it is highly threaded with processing and cache access extraordinarily localized so AMD does not need to hit its Infinity Fabric.
AMD Ryzen 3 Launch July 27
In two weeks, AMD will be selling Ryzen 3 CPUs. These are 4-core, 4-thread models. We were slightly surprised to see this as AMD has been touting its desire to abstain from artificially de-tuning its chips. With SMT disabled, AMD is doing just that. The AMD Ryzen 3 1300X has a base clock of 3.5 GHz and boost of 3.7 GHz. The Ryzen 3 1200 has a base clock of 3.1 GHz and boost to 3.4 GHz.
Final Words
Overall competition is good, and we think that the high clock speeds of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper will all but kill the low core count/ low memory capacity Intel Xeon E5 workstation market.
