The battle between Intel and AMD is intensifying, and when it is not one it is the other that offers us new samples of its potential to achieve more powerful and surprising processors.
In this case, AMD has taken a unique step: the new processors of its Threadripper family again offer beastly configurations with 16, 24 and 32 cores (and twice as many threads). Let’s welcome the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, 3960X and 3970X.
The answer to the Intel X Series family has arrived, and it has been blunt. The new Threadripper takes advantage of all the improvements that AMD has been integrating into its third-generation Ryzen, and both the Zen 2 architecture and the 7 nm manufacturing process are here protagonists.
The new models also have 88 PCIe 4.0 tracks that give even more room to maneuver when taking advantage of them with multiple graphic cards or storage devices (SSDs of this type literally “fly”) that can take advantage of the bandwidth of these connections.
These new chips also have more cache and support 3,200 MHz DDR4 memory, and in AMD they also emphasize that they have a higher working frequency than that of their competitors, something that as seen in the table is true for the i9-9980XE Intel but not for the impending i9-10980XE, although the latter “only” has 18 cores and 36 threads.
The new processors make use of a new chipset called TRX40 that makes them incompatible with current motherboards, and interestingly this chipset fails to squeeze the USB standard to the theoretical maximum of USB 3.2 Gen 2 of 20 Gbps, reaching only in half, 10 Gbps.
Although the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9 3970X is certainly the most striking, probably the most balanced in the family is the Ryzen 9 3950X with 16 cores at 4.7 GHz and 32 threads and with a TDP content of 105 W. It also has the so-called Eco-Mode that allows achieving greater efficiency and lower performance (up to 77% of the total in that mode) to ensure that when its full potential is not needed it works at 65 W of TDP.
There is also a more launched dessert processor and with a totally different orientation: the AMD Athlon 300G is “the only processor unlocked in this segment”, which allows overclocking in a surprising dual-core CPU with a TDP of only 35 W and Vega 3 graphics that, has a price of only 49 dollars.
