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Last year, AMD’s Threadripper blew the doors off Intel’s HEDT business by offering far more CPU cores at a much lower overall price.
The Threadripper 1950X proved far more effective at the $1,000 price point than the Core i9-7900X, though Intel was able to retain overall performance leadership with its Core i9-7980XE an 18-core chip at $1,999, though we’ve seen the chip for a bit lower than this retail.
But now AMD is positioning itself to claim overall leadership again with the Threadripper 2, a new CPU family with up to 32 cores per CPU.
When AMD first demoed Threadripper last year, keen-eyed enthusiasts soon realized the chip packed two “real” Zen die, with eight cores each, but also two “dummy” die that were simply intended to stabilize the overall package.
But given that Threadripper is a modular design, there was never a reason why AMD couldn’t simply slap down real die and activate a 32-core CPU analogous to what they’ve used for Epyc. Turns out, that’s exactly what they did.
According to AMD, Threadripper 2 is based on the Zen+ architecture and will be available in two flavors a 24-core / 48-thread CPU and a 32-core / 64-thread CPU. Both will have a base frequency of 3GHz with a boost of 3.4GHz, though this last is a work-in-progress figure and could change before launch.
That’s significantly lower than the Threadripper 1950X, which launched with a peak clock of 4GHz, and it implies that Threadripper 2, like TR itself, will really only be attractive for those users who can truly load the CPU cores with enormous amounts of work.
TDP on both chips will be 250W, but the demos AMD showed were air-cooled. New motherboard designs are expected to be available due to the higher power requirements, though older X399 boards should work.
These older boards may not offer as much overclocking potential as users want, though overclocking chips like TR or TR2 is largely a fool’s errand in any case.
You might squeeze out another few hundred MHz, but core-to-core variability and the intrinsic difficulty of tuning an overclock for high frequencies across 24-32 cores will limit maximum frequencies.