There are some of us who can make practical use of more cores in their daily workflow. Like 32 cores, to be precise.
The first of the second-gen Threadripper CPUs are available as of this morning, although you’ll need to fork out a staggering $2699 to pick it up. It’s the Threadripper 2990WX, which ships with a monster 32 cores/64 threads, base and boost clock speeds of 3.0Ghz and 4.2GHz respectively, 64MB of L3 cache and 64 PCIe 3.0 lanes.
In other words: this is more the kind of CPU for making games, not playing them.
Later this month, the Threadripper 2950X (16c/32t, 3.5GHz/4.4GHz) will become available for $US899 – there’s no local pricing just yet – while the Threadripper 2970WX (24c/48t, 3.0GHz/4.2GHz) will land in October and sell for $1349. The Threadripper 2920X, which comes with a more modest 12c/24t and 3.5Ghz/4.3GHz base and boost clocks, will launch in the same month for $US649.
The Wraith air cooler for the Threadripper is hilariously large. Image: Gizmodo
This is good news, mind you, if you do a lot of video transcoding, 3D editing, AutoCAD, and so on. It’s less useful for gaming, since most games still tend to get more performance out of CPUs with higher frequencies, rather than CPUs with eight or more cores. You’ll notice the difference if you’re trying to do multiple CPU-intensive tasks at once – note that I’m not talking a video game and streaming here, but more 3D rendering while pushing out a file through Adobe Premiere.
We’ll have a little more info about Threadripper throughout the week. If you’re interested in the CPU, PLE Copmuters, PC Case Gear, Mwave, Computer Alliance and Scorptec are the only places with stock right now. Here’s a quick list on StaticICE if you want to dig through the details.
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