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AMD Threadripper 1950X review: Better than Intel in almost every way
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TECH / PRODUCT NEWS & REVIEWS

AMD Threadripper 1950X review: Better than Intel in almost every way
Cheaper, faster, and more feature-rich than Skylake-X—what's not to love?

by Mark Walton (UK) - Aug 10, 2017 6:40pm IST
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With an orange and blue color scheme to boot...
If Ryzen was a polite, if firm way of telling the world that AMD is back in the processor game, then Threadripper is a foul-mouthed, middle-finger-waving, kick-in-the-crotch "screw you" aimed squarely at the usurious heart of Intel. It's an olive branch to a part of the PC market stung by years of inflated prices, sluggish performance gains, and the feeling that, if you're not interested in low-power laptops, Intel isn't interested in you.

Where Intel charges $1,000/£1,000 for 10 cores and 20 threads in the form of the Core i9-7900X, AMD offers 16C/32T with Threadripper 1950X. Where Intel limits chipset features and PCIe lanes the further down the product stack you go—the latter being ever more important as storage moves away from the SATA interface—AMD offers quad-channel memory, eight DIMM slots, and 64 PCIe lanes even on the cheapest CPU for the platform.

Threadripper embraces the enthusiasts, the system builders, and the content creators that shout loud and complain often, but evangelise products like no other. It's the new home for extravagant multi-GPU setups, and RAID arrays built on thousands of dollars worth of M.2 SSDs. It's where performance records can be broken, and where content creators can shave precious minutes from laborious production tasks, while still having more than enough remaining horsepower to get their game on.
Sure, dive deep into the technicalities and Intel's Skylake-X is still the absolute fastest when it comes to pure instructions-per-clock performance and high-frame-rate gaming. But the sheer daring of AMD Threadripper and accompanying X399 platform is nothing short of astonishing. Its performance, particularly in content creation tasks and production workloads, wipes the floor with the Intel equivalent. Taken as a whole, there really is no competition—Threadripper is the High End Desktop (HEDT) platform to beat.

Double trouble

When AMD unveiled its Zen architecture, which finally morphed into a product as Ryzen, much was said about Infinity Fabric, the company's new interconnect designed for maximum scalability. The 14nm FinFET Zen core is designed as a four-core-complex (CCX), with Infinity Fabric used to bind two CCX together to create the eight-core CPUs of Ryzen 7. What many didn't quite realise at the time is just how well Infinity Fabric would work (after a few teething troubles were resolved, at least) and just how far AMD could push it.

SPECS AT A GLANCE AMD THREADRIPPER 1950X AMD THREADRIPPER 1920X AMD THREADRIPPER 1900X AMD RYZEN 1800X
ARCHITECTURE Zen Zen Zen Zen
CORES/THREADS 16/32 12/24 8/16 8/16
BASE CLOCK 3.4GHz 3.5GHz 3.8GHz 3.6GHz
MAX BOOST CLOCK 4.0GHz 4.0GHz 4.0GHz 4.0GHz
XFR BOOST 200MHz 200MHz 200MHz 100MHz
L3 CACHE 32MB 32MB ? 16MB
PROCESS 14nm 14nm 14nm 14nm
TDP 180W 180W 125W 95W
PRICE $1000/£1000 $799/£799 $549/£549 $500/£449
Threadripper 1950X is effectively two eight-core Ryzen 1800X CPUs placed onto the same package joined together by Infinity Fabric. The result is a CPU measuring a mammoth 72mm by 55mm, which slots into the even larger TR4 motherboard socket. Threadripper is, physically at least, the biggest consumer CPU released since the cartridge slot format of the Pentium 2—and even then the CPU itself was just a small part of the cartridge.