AMD officially unveils Ryzen Threadripper 3990X

At CES 2020, AMD has released further information on the forthcoming 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, including a release date - February 7th. 

Building upon the success that the Threadripper 3970X and 3960X have brought AMD when it comes to the high end desktop market, the Threadripper 3990X offers a rather mighty 64 cores and 128 threads. You'll be paying the price though with each of these threads costing you $31. Yup, the Threadripper 3990X will retail at $3,990. Expect similar pricing in the UK. 

Confirming what we already knew in November, the processor will fit into existing TRX40 motherboards, maintaining the same 280W TDP as other Threadripper chips. AMD has already recommended a water-cooling setup to get the most out of this processor. It'll have a base clock speed of 2.9GHz with 4.3GHz as its boost clock. L3 cache wise, it offers a rather impressive 288MB. 

AMD didn't provide many details on performance but it did say that it'll reach 25,000 in Maxon's Cinebench R20 benchmark. That might not be double the performance of the Threadripper 3970X (coming in at just under 17,000) but it's certainly a huge improvement. We really need to see it in action to see what it's truly capable of. 

AMD did, however, demonstrate it outperforming a Dual Xeon Platinum 8280 system when finishing a render job. Notably, the Threadripper 3990X ended up 30% faster than its Intel rival, even though the combined price of the Xeon system is about $20,000 for the processors alone, with the Threadripper 3990X coming in at $10 shy of $4,000. If AMD is trying to rub it in against its rival, it's doing a very good job of it right now.

So, compared to previous Threadrippers and mostly everything else, the Threadripper 3990X is all round bigger, better, and intimidatingly like huge overkill for the average consumer. Given the price tag, we wouldn't expect many - if any - home users to be diving in just yet. For professional creators however, the 3990X looks to be fairly unrivalled, and no doubt such improvements will trickle down to more consumer friendly offerings soon enough. It's another step forward for AMD ensuring it has absolute dominance over Intel right now.