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Threadripper-Feature

Last year, AMD'south Threadripper blew the doors off Intel's HEDT business by offer far more than CPU cores at a much lower overall cost. The Threadripper 1950X proved far more effective at the $i,000 price point than the Core i9-7900X, though Intel was able to retain overall operation leadership with its Cadre i9-7980XE — an 18-core chip at $1,999, though we've seen the chip for a scrap lower than this retail. But now AMD is positioning itself to claim overall leadership once again with the Threadripper 2, a new CPU family with upwards to 32 cores per CPU.

When AMD first demoed Threadripper last year, keen-eyed enthusiasts soon realized the bit packed two "real" Zen die, with viii cores each, just also two "dummy" die that were but intended to stabilize the overall package. But given that Threadripper is a modular design, there was never a reason why AMD couldn't simply slap down real die and activate a 32-core CPU coordinating to what they've used for Epyc. Turns out, that's exactly what they did.

Threadripper-Announcement
According to AMD, Threadripper 2 is based on the Zen+ architecture and volition be available in two flavors — a 24-core / 48-thread CPU and a 32-core / 64-thread CPU. Both will have a base frequency of 3GHz with a boost of iii.4GHz, though this final is a work-in-progress figure and could change before launch. That's significantly lower than the Threadripper 1950X, which launched with a peak clock of 4GHz, and information technology implies that Threadripper ii, like TR itself, will really merely be attractive for those users who can truly load the CPU cores with enormous amounts of work.

TDP on both chips will be 250W, but the demos AMD showed were air-cooled. New motherboard designs are expected to be available due to the higher power requirements, though older X399 boards should work. These older boards may non offer equally much overclocking potential as users want, though overclocking chips like TR or TR2 is largely a fool'southward errand in any case. Yous might squeeze out another few hundred MHz, simply core-to-core variability and the intrinsic difficulty of tuning an overclock for high frequencies across 24-32 cores will limit maximum frequencies.

The Affect On Intel

It's only been a few days since Intel announced its own 28-core 5GHz CPU, albeit 1 that relies on special cooling (more on this shortly). AMD tossing its hat into the band with a 32-core chip seems to fix up an most inevitable disharmonism-of-the-titans situation. In fact, just how much these ii fries interact will depend a keen bargain on pricing as well every bit overall market place positioning. A 14 percent cadre count advantage for AMD (32 cores versus 28) is enough to be outmatched by clock frequencies, while finding tests that scale up to 28-32 cores in the first place will be increasingly difficult.

We've said this earlier in our high-core CPU reviews, but information technology bears repeating: The higher the core count, the more hard it is to load the full CPU or to find applications that won't struggle to detect meaningful differences. Fries like this tin can certainly game, simply they aren't really intended as gaming CPUs, at least not more than incidentally. But again — with the Threadripper 1950X at $ane,000 while the 18-cadre Core i9-7980XE is a $2,000 chip, the competitive field between the two CPUs is limited. If AMD positions its 32-core Threadripper ii at $2,000 and Intel brings in its own 28-core workstation chip at $4,000, the gap between the 2 solutions will again be broad.

AMD's decision to push harder on Threadripper configurations is a niggling surprising, given how few workloads scale up this well, but it would imply that Threadripper's overall sales and response take been strong enough to justify bringing out a new version of the production. Toll and availability information should follow soon, with rumors of an Baronial launch.