AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X

Sure, you need a very specific set of circumstances to need 64 cores. Sure, a healthy bank balance is also a necessity, but if you want what the Threadripper 3990X has to offer there is nothing, nothing, around that can touch it for hilariously fast rendering speeds. Someone hand Intel a candle, they are so far in the dark with anything Threadripper has to offer it's actually starting to get a bit embarrassing.

One needs to move away from the desktop and think of the server space when fully evaluating this unique chip. For businesses whose compute requirement was previously expressed by dual Xeons, with little need for a terabyte of memory, AMD, even at $3,990, offers a real alternative at a fraction of the price. If you can find a genuine use for its intrinsic power, this is a remarkable processor.

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X isn’t perfect and it’s meant to appease a specific sub-set of users, obviously. Even still, we must commend AMD for continually and aggressively pushing the envelope since the introduction of its first-gen Ryzen architecture. AMD’s efforts that last few years have re-shaped the enthusiast computing landscape and injected some real excitement. If AMD continues on this trajectory with Zen 3 and beyond, we can’t wait to see what the company has in store for us all next year.

AMD is continuing to assert its performance dominance in the HEDT/workstation market by offering a processor that is affordable enough to allow reasonable people working on reasonable projects for reasonable companies with reasonable IT budgets to reach an echelon of performance that simply was not available prior to the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X. That deserves an immense amount of credit. The importance of this statement that AMD has made to the market should not be underestimated.

In the end, Threadripper's biggest processors serve the smallest portion of the market but do have the biggest effect in that same market. For us common folk, Threadripper processors may not even make any sense, I mean you can get one for bragging rights and fun if you wanted to, nobody would hold it against you.

For those who can use the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and its 64 cores/ 128 threads, along with PCIe Gen4 I/O, a completely new tier of per-socket performance is attainable. Having those options is important to drive the market forward, pushing boundaries, and advancing what can be created on the desktop.

The 64-core 128-thread Threadripper 3990X is a highly-specialized processor that provides incredible performance in a narrow cross-section of workloads, but at a very attractive price point given its capabilities.

The Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is a best in class CPU from AMD, and is the most powerful CPU we have ever seen for content production and rendering. It's a perfect high performance workstation CPU, and it can easily overclock if you have the proper infrastructure to support it.

Overall, despite the fact that it doesn’t scale well all over, the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is a phenomenal processor. The fact that it doesn’t scale well in every case appears to us to be more the fault of software not being designed for it, rather than be a fault of the product itself. At the second-gen Threadripper launch, the situation was bad enough, as 32-core CPUs finally hit the desktop. Now we’re seeing a doubling of cores once again – that’s going to take some time to properly support.