Threadripper

AMD has released specification for their new Ryzen based "Threadripper" monsters. These are huge CPU's and are equal to two Ryzen 5/7 chips. The manufacturing process allegedly just 'glues' two other zen silicone cores together (visible in the image below) and then 'bins' the lowest performing cores. Binning is when a manufacturer turns off cores on a CPU that are not up to standard. This leads to a range of core count models but it means they are all high-performance cores.

Threadripper is a CPU line that has a very high core count. Their top end 1950x model will have 16 cores and 32 threads meaning a huge number of tasks can be executed at once. You can even run multiple sets of multithreaded workloads. For example, you can render, stream and encode at the same time. No blue team CPU currently offers this many threads. Due to such high core counts, Threadripper CPU's have a very high TDP (Thermal Design Power) going all the way up to 180W. This means an extremely beefy air cooler or a water cooling loop will definitely be required to run the CPUs without any thermal throttling. This is definitely the biggest downside to any high core count CPUs. Another negative of high core count models is that they generally have lower operating frequencies. The models discussed here have a base frequency of 3.4gHz. This offers a plenty high enough per core performance but adding some RGB LED strips to your case should help by tripling all computing performance 😀.


If I was a high-end content creator planning on building a new system in the next year I would definitely choose AMD over any core i9 processors. (If real world performance is equal to what AMD claims).