AMD's monstrous 64-core Threadripper 3990X: How much and how fast it will be

It wasn’t all about Ryzen 4000 laptops at CES for AMD. The company also finally said how much the monstrous 64-core Threadripper 3990X teased last fall will cost—and teased just how stupidly fast it will be too.

AMD said the 64-core Threadripper 3990X will cost $3,990 when it hits the streets on Feb. 7. While that’s more than some used cars, the actual value of the 64-core CPU isn’t that out of line when looked at from a bulk purchase point of view. The actual cost per individual thread is about $31. It’s just that you have to buy 128 of them.

bucks per thread jan 2020 — The per-thread pricing of AMD’s new 64-core, 128-thread chip works out to about a $31 per thread.

The CPU will slot into existing TRX40 motherboards and maintains the same 280 watt TDP profile as previous 3rd-gen Threadripper chips. AMD said the Threadripper 3990X will have 2.9GHz and 4.3GHz base and boost clocks, respectively, and feature a massive 288MB of cache.

For the average consumer (and even the above-average consumer) it’s overkill, but someone doing visual effects or heavy-duty multi-tasking will likely find the price of the new 64-core Threadripper 3990X to be worth every penny.

Much of that comes from its performance too. AMD didn’t spill too many details but said it will hit 25,000 in Maxon’s Cinebench R20 benchmark. We cobbled up a quick chart comparing the provided performance details of the Threadripper 3990X along with existing scores of lower core count parts.

ryzen threadripper 3990wx — AMD’s new 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is off the charts in performance.

Although we don’t see quite double the performance of the 32-core Threadripper 3970X, it’s not clear if the scaling is a limitation of clock frequencies, architectural limitations, or OS issues—or if Maxon’s Cinebench R20 just doesn’t scale to 128-threads. The reason we don’t know how far Cinebench can go? Because no company has ever dared to introduce a consumer or prosumer 64-core CPU.

Until now, that is.

And not to rub it in too much, but AMD also demonstrated the new Threadripper 3990X out performing a dual Xeon machine with with 56 cores in a V-Ray render. While the Threadripper took about an hour, the dual Xeon took another 30 minutes to finish a render job.

Correction: AMD’s Threadripper 3990X was mistakenly referred to as Threadripper 3990WX in an earlier version of this article.