News AMD officially unveils Ryzen Threadripper 3990X

Ahh and we just ordered a 3970x build at work! However that whole system was just north of £4k rather than just for the CPU (assuming the usual near 1:1 conversion rate)

 

The real question is: what does Intel have they might be able to compete with AMD's offerings? Nothing right now, but maybe later this year?

 

*sad Intel noises*

 

They have a 56 core Xeon that they could offer in an unlocked variant (just like they did with the 28 core one) if they really wanted to.

But given how tiny of a niche market that 64 Core Ripper will have... Intel can easily get away with doing nothing about it.

 

It's not even about margins or sales with a show like CES - it's about saving/showing face.

Intel just basically rolled over and said "sorry, we don't have anything to compete on desktop, server or HEDT right now". And it's looking more and more like AMD are about to hurt Intel's last real stronghold - laptops.

 

Not yet. The Achilles Heel of previous Ryzen mobile chips has been there very high idle power draw. For all their slides, AMD did not mention an idle draw reduction, and their slide on power put down 75% of their efficiency gains to process gains. That helps little for idle draw, which is almost entirely down to architecture design (specifically granularity of power gating). If AMD had solved that bugbear they would certainly be advertising it.

 

Well I gotta say I'm seeing an awful lot of laptops with AMD CPUs on YouTube highlights.

 

Yup. All of Asus' are Ryzen 4000 and I've seen a couple of MSI also.

However what they need is a Dell or HP agreement to really hit Intel in the pants.

 

True, they seemingly decided not to reply. But, tbh, their 56 core is okay at best compared to the 3990X. And then we'll start talking power draw, heat and cost. And that's pretty much where the road ends for Intel. Sure, there are few scenarios they still hold the upper hand core-for-core. But in many if not most use cases they'll lose.

 

bigger issue is will it work with more than 256gb of ram, 64 cores is nice and all but for that type of use case ram could be a problem (as it only supports normal DDR4 ram not buffered ram) xeon/EPIC CPUs can take way beyond 1TB of ram

 

TRX40 boards quote 256 as the max.