Nothing comes close to AMD’s new $1,999 Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, one of three elite chips in the third generation of AMD’s mega-CPU line, when it comes to desktop processors below the server level. This chip is currently the best in the high-end desktop market because it has 32 cores and 64 threads. If you use programs that need as many cores and horsepower as possible, this silicon is what you want. The Threadripper 3970X and its surrounding platform, which is anchored by the brand-new TRX40 chipset, shatter multicore records for its intended use—crushing core-aware tasks. While its single-core results are unremarkable, they are still impressive. It is a worthy replacement for the Threadripper 2970WX, which we tested, and the Threadripper 2990WX, which we did not. It also puts pressure on Intel’s rival silicon, particularly the brand-new Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition. It is one of the best CPUs in the high-end desktop (HEDT) world for content creators, massive multitaskers, and situations that require enormous amounts of device bandwidth and memory access, earning it PCMag’s Editors’ Choice.
The term “HEDT” may no longer suffice in 2019, given the changes in the desktop CPU market. AMD appears to be targeting the “highest-end desktop market” with the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. Indeed, on the nominally mainstream AMD AM4 platform, chips like the $749 AMD Ryzen 9 3950X that I recently reviewed offer sufficient brute-force multicore power to be considered high-end in almost any circumstance. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, a fantastic task-cruncher from the second generation, has the same core/thread count as the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X.
This chip seems to necessitate a new classification, so I came up with my own term for it. Technically, it is a HEDT chip because it has 32 cores and 64 threads. However, it also outperforms the closest competitor by such a large amount that it feels unfair to put them in the same category.
Despite this, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X’s base specifications do not appear to place it significantly ahead of AMD’s previous HEDT market leaders, given that a 32-core Threadripper 2990WX was released last year. The Ryzen Threadripper 3970X has 32 cores and 64 threads, as previously mentioned, operating at a base clock of 3.7GHz and a boost clock of 4.5GHz, respectively. However, the 2990WX has a base frequency of 3GHz and a boost frequency of 4.2GHz.) The 3970X has 144 MB of L2/L3 cache and needs up to 280 watts of power to run the entire megachip at full speed.
What has transpired since then? The Threadripper series of the third generation offers two significant enhancements over the previous model year: the adoption of the “chiplet”-based Zen 2 architecture, which first appeared in the Ryzen chips of the third generation, and the switch from 14nm to 7nm lithography. The chiplet design, which is held together by AMD’s Infinity Fabric, the company’s proprietary high-speed component interconnect layer, enables a significant increase in power in a significantly smaller area, contributes to a decrease in thermal output, and maintains a lower TDP.
The switch from the first- and second-generation Threadripper chips’ AMD X399 chipset and TR4 CPU socket to the new TRX40 chipset and sTRX4 socket, which enables four times the bandwidth to travel between the CPU and the chip, is another significant modification. Third-generation Threadrippers will not function on older X399/TR4 boards, despite the fact that the socket and intricate installation mechanism remain unchanged and the chip package remaining unchanged. Similarly, the new sTRX4 socket will not accommodate Threadripper chips of the first or second generation.)
Changes in the nature, number, and bandwidth potential of PCI Express lanes account for additional distinctions. First of all, PCI Express 4.0 makes its debut on the Threadripper platform, just as it did with the X570 chipset on mainstream Ryzen processors running the Zen 2 architecture last summer. The Threadripper of the third generation was designed to handle up to 72 PCI Express lanes at once, compared to the 64 lanes of the previous generation.
On the other hand, the most powerful rival Intel processors available right now, which are part of the brand-new 10th Generation “Cascade Lake-X” Core X-Series, can only handle up to 48 direct PCI Express 3.0 lanes for devices (24 lanes for devices shared with all of the traffic from USB and SATA, which amounts to 52 GBps of bandwidth). That number rises to 56 direct PCI Express 4.0 lanes and 16 PCI Express 4.0 lanes for devices paired with USB and SATA in the third generation of Threadripper, providing a total bandwidth of more than 133 GBps. These outer limits may be important if your system has multiple video cards and PCI Express storage that is full (some of the new TRX40 motherboards come with expansion cards that can carry four M.2 PCI Express SSDs in addition to several on the board). However, most of the time, they are only used in extreme PC builds and edge cases. Indeed, even though more is better, PCI Express lane counts are outpacing the capacity of even the most affluent professionals—or, at the very least, their wallets—to maximize them.
