After many months of rumours AMD has officially announced the third generation Threadripper CPUs. The first two of these behemoths out of the gate will be the 24 core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and the 32 Core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, both available to the public on November 25th.
Let’s get right into the numbers. The 3960X has 24 cores and thus 48 threads, it has a base clock speed of 3.8GHz and a stated boost speed of 4.5GHz. The total cache is 140MB and it has 72 usable PCI-E 4.0 lanes out of 88. The 3970X has 32 cores for 64 threads with a base clock of 3.7GHz and a stated boost of 4.5GHz. The total cache here is 144MB and it also has 72 usable PCI-E 4.0 lanes out of 88. The MSRP for the 3960X is $1399 and the MSRP for the 3970X is $1999.
One number that really stands out however for these CPUs is their TDP, thermal design power, wattage. This is not a direct reading of how much power they are using, but it is a good indication of it. Both of the new Threadrippers have a TDP of 280W. By way of comparison, the Intel X-series of HEDT CPUs all come in at 165W and the previous generation of Threadrippers came in around 250W. Safe to say we are looking at some extremely hardworking hardware here.
Alongside these CPUs AMD have also announced that there is a new socket for them, Socket sTRX4, which offers 4x more bandwidth than the previous generation.
So far we’ve only had glimpses of snatches of benchmarks from the pre-release versions of this generation, and they were not messing around. Now we know that the speeds are even faster for the commercially available CPUs the benchmark scores could be spectacular.