AMD THREADRIPPER AND RYZEN3

The last few months have seen a flurry of CPU releases as the RED and BLUE teams go toe to toe, vying for their piece of the mainstream PC market”pie”. Today AMD has announced the pricing and availability for additional CPUs including the long awaited Threadripper aimed directly at the HEDT (High End Desk Top) segment. This niche of the enthusiast market has been dominated by Intel for years but I have a feeling that’s all about to change.

The new Threadripper 1950X is AMD’s top dog in this segment, is going to offer 16 cores and 32 threads, quad channel memory and 64 PCIe lanes with a base clock of 3.4 GHz/4.0 GHz with precision boost. I find the pricing on this CPU, in my opinion, to be aimed directly at Intel’s newest i9 7900X 10C/20T CPU. Both of these CPUs cater to the same market and both have the same suggested retail price of $999.00 USD. The advantage here goes to Threadripper 1950X coming in at the same price but offering an additional 12 threads. In multi-threaded work loads that’s a huge gain.

Next in AMD’s stable is the Threadripper 1920X with 12 cores, 24 threads and 3.5 GHz base speed with a 4.0 GHz precision boost for a suggested $799 USD. As with the 1950X we still have the quad channel ram and 64 PCIe lanes accommodating up to four graphics cards. The Threadripper CPUs are going to require the new TR4 socket based motherboards equipped with the X399 chipset with availability in early August according to AMD.

Below I’ve included a YouTube video released by AMD highlighting the new Ryzen 3 CPUs and Threadripper series. Around the two minute mark Robert Hallock demos the new Threadripper CPUs going head to head against the i9 7900X in Cinebench R15. He didn’t give any specifics as to clock speeds or memory but I’m assuming they were all at stock.  Just to summarize for you, the i9 7900X returned a score of 2100 CB and the TR 1920X had a score of 2400 CB and the TR 1950X came back with a whopping score just over 3000 CB. How’s that for price to performance?

AMD RYZEN 3

The Ryzen 3 line according to AMD is poised to get more people into the Ryzen family at an affordable price. Funny though that the one thing they left out. The price. The good news is you won’t have to wait long to find out since Ryzen3 CPUs will be on the shelves July 27th and already have AM4 motherboard support in the x370 and B350 chipsets. Both Ryzen 3 desktop processors are 4 core, 4 thread CPUs. The Ryzen 3 1300X gives you a base speed of 3.5 GHz and a boost to 3.7 GHz, while the Ryzen 3 1200 comes in at 3.1 GHz and 3.4 GHz boost. With the right pricing these could be poised as the next “bargain gamer” for those looking to get into the PC gaming scene.

Looks like the next few weeks are going to be exciting times with AMD’s latest shot across the bow.

Shawn Jennings – Johan45