LAS VEGAS–At its CES media conference on Jan. 6th, AMD announced a slew of products, including a 64-core Threadripper processor, new performance mobile processors, and the new Radeon RX 5600XT graphics card.
Threadripper 3990X
By releasing the new Threadripper 3990X, AMD has completed its enthusiast-oriented Threadripper processor family. Boasting 64-cores or 128 threads, the Threadripper 3990X carries the highest core count of any of consumer processors ever released.
On stage, AMD pitted the Threadripper 3990X against a pair of Intel’s sever-grade Xeon 8280 Platinum processors. Together, the dual Xeon 8280 Platinums sport 56 cores and 112 threads–monstrous in their own right, but AMD showed that the Threadripper 3990X was 30 per cent faster in a V-Ray rendering benchmark while being $16,000 cheaper.
The Threadripper 3990X can reach an impressive 4.3GHz single-core boost clock, although its base clock is capped at just 2.9GHz–a price it must pay for carrying double the cores as the AMD Ryzen 3970X while retaining the same 280W TDP. Furthermore, the 3990X comes with a monstrous dose of cache: 288MB in total.
The AMD Threadipper 3990X will be available for US$3,990 starting Feb 7. At this price, you either know exactly what the return on investment will be or have enough expendable capital to not care.
Ryzen 7 4800U and Ryzen 7 4800H mobile processors
To challenge Intel’s performance mobile processors, AMD brought in the new Ryzen 7 4800U and Ryzen 7 5800H mobile processors.
The Ryzen 7 4800U carries 8 cores, 16 threads operating at 4.2GHz boost and 1.8GHz base. It comes with 8 Radeon graphics cores and a 15W TDP envelope.
On stage, AMD demonstrated that Ryzen 7 4700H was able to match Intel’s Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake mobile processor in single-thread performance in Cinebench R20 and up to 90 per cent faster in multi-thread.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, however, as the Ryzen 7 4700 has double the number of cores and threads, although it does so by performing at the same TDP as the Intel chip.
AMD also announced the Ryzen 7 4800H. Although it has the same number of cores as the Ryzen 7 4800U, its higher 45W TDP allows its base clock to increase to 2.9GHz. Instead of comparing it to Intel’s mobile processor, AMD took the performance of the Ryzen 7 4800H against the 95W Intel Core i7-9700K desktop processor to show that it outperforms the Intel chip in 3DMark FireStrike, specifically the Physics test that stresses the processor.
The two new chips will be integrated into various OEMs starting 1Q2020. Two early adopters, the Dell G5 SE and Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, were shown on stage. AMD is expecting more than 100 laptop designs to include the new Ryzen 4000 mobile processors.
Radeon RX 5600XT
Those who waited on AMD to release a high-performance graphics solution was greeted with the mid-range RX 5600XT instead.
In addition, AMD also announced the RX 5600XT graphics card, a solution designed to compete in the 1080p gaming space. Based on the RDNA architecture, the GPU features 36 compute units running at 1,560MHz base clock/1,735MHz boost clock and 6GB of GDDR6.
The RX 5600XT will be available on Jan. 21st for US$279.
