AMD shows Ryzen 9 3950X, 3rd Gen Threadripper
AMD announced this week a trio of new processors that run the whole gamut from starter chip to high-end beasts. AMD detailed what its 3rd-gen Threadripper will look like, showed off the new Ryzen 9 3950X, and even released a new Athlon APU, the 3000G.
Ryzen 9 3950XThe Ryzen 9 3950X is the one most of us are going to be eyeballing. The 3950X is a 16-core, 32-thread AM4 CPU. If you already have an 
AMD offered up some performance numbers for us to peruse, too. The company says the 3950X is 22% higher in single-threaded performance when compared to its own Ryzen 7 2700X in Cinebench R20. Meanwhile, on the multi-threaded side, AMD compared it to Intel's big boy, the Core i9-9900K, and says their chip is 79% higher there. Gaming performance should be on-par with the 9900K, too.
Like Intel's 9900K, AMD says the 3950X is optimized for liquid cooling and recommends at least a 240mm x 150mm AIO cooler to go with this chip.
The Ryzen 9 3950X will retail for $749 USD starting November 25.
3rd-Gen Threadrippers Revealed
AMD also talked about its high-end desktop processors, the 3rd generation of its Threadripper series. The series will debut with two chips: the Threadripper 3960X and Threadripper 3970X.
The 3960X is a 24-core, 48-thread chip with a 3.8 GHz base clock that boosts up to 4.5 GHz maximum. and 140MB of L2 and L3 cache combined. That one is going for $1,399.
The 3970X, meanwhile, is a 32-core, 64-thread monstrosity with 3.7 GHz base clocks and 4.5 GHz boost. Take a deep breath before you read the price: $1,999. Like the 3950X, these will be available on November 25.
They're both sTRX4 socket chips that are compatible with AMD's TRX4 chipset and motherboards. While it does use the new socket, the new Threadripper will be backward compatible with TR4 cooling solutions. Any cooler or waterblock you used with your TR4 Threadripper should make the jump if you decide to upgrade. Compared to the Ryzen chips above, the 3rd-Gen Threadripper will be a power-hungry chip, with a TDP of 280W.
AMD says the sTRX4 Threadrippres have a quad-channel DDR4 memory interface that can handle up to 2TB of memory. The chips have a total of 64 PCIe 4.0 lanes, with 48 dedicated toward PCIe x16 slots, 8 toward the chipset bus, and 8 lanes that can be dedicated toward a pair of NVMe slots, x4 onboard devices (Ethernet, WiFi, USB, etc), or additional SATA ports.
ECO modeAMD also talked about its new ECO mode, which will come to all AM4 processors with Zen 2 cores. In short, it'll let you configure the maximum power draw in AMD's Ryzen Master software so that you can crank down the performance when you don't need all that juice. AMD picks on its new 3950X chip to demonstrate the effectiveness of this feature; turn ECO mode on and you'll see 77% of your performance with an impressive 44% less power draw and an estimated 7C lower temperatures.
AMD Athlon 3000GYou wouldn't want all that CPU power to leak out the bottom, though, and so AMD also revealed its Athlon 3000G. This 12-nm chip combines 2 Zen+ CPU cores (4 threads total) and Radeon Vega 3 graphics with 3 Vega Next-Generation Compute Units (NGCU). The CPU has a base clock of 3.5 GHz, and AMD is offering an unlocked base-clock multiplier. In other words, this thing is meant to be overclocked. The price seems to confirm that - the 3000G will be just $49 when it comes out on November 19.
The post AMD shows Ryzen 9 3950X, 3rd Gen Threadripper appeared first on The Tech Report.