AMD Threadripper—16 cores and 32 threads for $999–arrives in August

AMD today announced the pricing and (approximate) availability for Threadripper, its high-end desktop platform that was first unveiled in May.

The top-end part will be the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X: a 16 core, 32 thread chip with a base clock of 3.4GHz and a boost clock of 4.0GHz for $999. Below that will be the 1920X: 12 cores, 24 threads, at 3.5/4.0GHz, for $799.

Both chips will use a 4094-pin socket called TR4 and the X399 chipset, offering 64 lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity and four channels of DDR4 memory. Both have a notional power envelope of 180W. Internally, the chip is essentially a doubled up version of the existing Ryzens: AMD's basic building block is a unit of eight cores with 16 threads (split internally into two core complexes of four cores each). Threadripper has two of these chips in each package; the Epyc server processor has four.

In terms of raw numbers, the chips compare pretty favorably to Intel's recently released Skylake-X platform. On the Intel side, $999 gets you 10 cores, 20 threads, at 3.3 to 4.5GHz, with 44 PCIe lanes. Intel doesn't have anything at $799; its $599 chip offers eight cores, 16 threads, at 3.6 to 4.5GHz, but with only 28 PCIe lanes.

AMD thus has a considerable advantage in terms of core count and I/O bandwidth. Intel, in contrast, has better per-core performance and higher clock speeds. As such, we'd expect that the performance comparison between Threadripper and Skylake-X to be similar to that of Ryzen and Kaby Lake; workloads that can take full advantage of all those threads may tend to favor Threadripper, but workloads with greater sensitivity to single-threaded performance will run better on Skylake-X.

Threadripper processors and motherboards will become available in early August. Dell will be taking pre-orders for its Alienware Area 51 system with Threadripper a little earlier, on July 27.

AMD has also announced specs and availability—though oddly, not pricing—of its low-end Ryzen 3 chips. The Ryzen 3 1300X will offer four cores, four threads, at 3.5 to 3.7GHz. The Ryzen 3 1200 is a four core, four thread chip running at 3.1 to 3.4GHz. They'll both go on sale on July 27.