AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X
$1,440 | WWW.AMD.COM Ripping up the high-end rulebook.
Delivering a product to this market is the final piece of the desktop CPU puzzle for AMD, following the release of Ryzen 7, 5 and 3 on the AM4 socket. Now with arrival of the TR4 socket and the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, featuring 16 cores, 32 threads, quad-channel memory, 64 PCIe lanes and extended frequency range (XFR) of 4.2GHz, AMD hasn’t just entered the arena, it’s thrown down a challenge to the reigning king, Intel.
There are unique characteristics both for and against when assessing the comparison of the 1950X versus its similarly priced competitor, the Intel Core i9-7900X. Intel’s offering sounds different enough on paper. Starting with 10 cores and 20 threads in the 7900X, it is comfortably behind the 16 cores and 32 threads counted in the 1950X. But it’s not all about core count, as the 7900X delivers higher potential clock speeds and improved per-core processing efficiency. On the flip-side is the significant difference in core count lending the 1950X increased performance in heavily multi-threaded workloads.
Judging by the benchmark results, if you do multithreaded work but still see high value in per-core efficiency, the Intel may be the better choice — though, this appears to depend on how well the game code handles nT processing. If your computing focus is production orientated, such as audio engineering, video editing, gaming and streaming simultaneously, 3D modelling and so on, the high core count of the 1950X brings it victory.