AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990X shows up on 3DMark, supposed insane pricing could give Intel the chills

A 3DMark entry of AMD's upcoming HEDT beast, the Ryzen Threadripper 2990X, has surfaced online thanks to trusted leaker TUM_APISAK. The 3DMark entry shows no performance figures. It, however, confirms that the 32-core 64-thread part will indeed be called the Ryzen Threadripper 2990X. The leak follows the recent prototype benchmark results revealed by Chinese review site HKEPC. 

Back when AMD made the Gen 2 Threadrippers official at Computex 2018, it just said that new CPUs for the HEDT segment are in the offing but did not make any performance claims or show off a live demonstration like Intel did for its upcoming 28-core chip. The 3DMark entry shows the Threadripper 2990X to sport a 3 GHz base and 3.8 GHz turbo. We, however, know from HKEPC's results that the boost clock can reach up to 4 GHz on all cores so, in all likelihood, this motherboard might not have had support for XFR2 in the BIOS. Either that or this could be a pre-production engineering sample.

Now on to the most juicy information. Videocardz reports spotting a listing at European online retailer Cyberport, which lists the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990X at... wait for it... Euro 1,509 putting it just at a Euro 500 premium over the Threadripper 1950X at launch. That is insane value in itself (for HEDT folks, of course). If the pricing is indeed true, the Threadripper 2990X costs almost Euro 500 less than even Intel's current HEDT flagship, the 18-core Core i9-7980XE. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Intel's upcoming 28-core offering would be priced much higher considering the fact that the Xeon Platinum 8180 from which it is derived costs about US$10,000 (yes, 4 zeros!). Intel also managed to garner some criticism for slyly showing the 28-core CPU running at 5 GHz on all cores, which automatically put AMD in a better light PR-wise. 

Pricing information apart, the other point of the concern in Cyberport's listing is the TDP rating at 180W. Now, this could be true if AMD is following Intel's way of reporting TDP based on the base clock but we will soon get to know about this as we near launch date sometime in Q3 2018. 

The Gen 2 Threadrippers — the 24C/48T 2970X and the 32C/64T 2990X are based on the Zen+ architecture similar to their desktop Ryzen brethren and thus bring with them all the goodness of the new Optimization architecture including XFR2, Precision Boost 2, and AMD SenseMI technologies. We will have to play the waiting game till AMD officially announces pricing and availability information.

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