AMD has stated before that their 3rd-generation Ryzen Threadripper will be bolstered further with higher end parts including a 64-core/128-thread model. Today in their CES keynote, AMD is announcing the new Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and will be available February 7, 2020 and will have a retail price of US$3,990.
AMD released the 3rd-gen Ryzen Threadripper based on the Zen2 architecture last November with the 32-core Threadripper 3970X and 24-core Threadripper 3960X heading the pack. The new HEDT processors from AMD breaks the upgrade path as it needed a socket change with the new processors using the sTRX4 package and the TRX40 chipset.
The obvious counterpart for the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is the EPYC Rome HPC chips from AMD but the 3990X is distinguishes itself with a more narrow quad-channel memory interface versus the eight-channel on the EPYC chips.
The Ryzen Threadripper 3990X features a base frequency of 2.9Ghz and a 4.3Ghz Turbo frequency. It has a massive 288MB total cache and features the same I/O configuration as the Threadripper 3970X: quad-channel memory interface supporting up to 2TB of memory, PCI-Express gen4 x8 pipe to the TRX40 chipset and up to three PCI-Express gen4 x16 links to the processor. It will also support ECC memory.
AMD presented a performance preview of the Threadripper 3990X which saw a single 3990X compared to a dual-processor Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 which total 56 cores and 112 threads. The side by side performance benchmark using V-ray rendering test saw the Threadripper 3990X showing a 30% faster performance than the Intel machine.
The kicker here is that the AMD Threadripper 3990X is priced at $3,990. The Intel 2P Xeon 8280 CPU alone is at $20,000 for the CPU alone.
