AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X already offers a previous-gen Threadripper number of cores and threads and it’s slated to arrive soon. But for the prosumers out there with deeper pockets, there’s something even more interesting in the near future. We’re talking about AMD’s third-gen Threadripper. We have official confirmation about the 3950X but there’s very little official information on the ground about 3rd-gen Threadripper apart from AMD implying that it does indeed exist and is slated to arrive in November.
But new details have now surfaced about the naming scheme of the upcoming Threadripper parts. The SATA-IO unintentionally gave away part of the nomenclature in a listing spotted by Computerbase. The latest Threadripper parts will (unsurprisingly) be called 39X0X. This is in line with previous-generation Threadripper nomenclature. Logically, considering that the Ryzen 9 3950X already exists, the first “X” will be a higher number than 5. We could be looking at the 3960X all the way through the 3990X. Earlier leaks indicated that the top model third-gen Threadripper would feature 64 cores and 128 threads. This model is probably the TR
While gaming generally doesn’t require more than 12-16 threads (at most, in a handful of titles), tasks like video editing and encoding will happily use as many threads and cores as you throw at them. Xeon-based production platforms are notoriously expensive. Castle Peak could finally bring serious multithreaded performance down to a price that small and mid-size video studios (and individual producers) could afford.
We wouldn’t recommend these parts for gaming. The upcoming 3950X is likely to be the overkill CPU of choice for the coming years. But we find it highly unlikely that you’ll need anything more than 8 cores for 9th gen titles. But if you’re in the market for a video production CPU, It’s a good idea to hang on till November and see what Castle Peak has to offer.
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