Bill Roberson/Digital Trends
AMD’s upcoming second-generation Threadripper CPUs could cost more than twice as much as their predecessors, making them an expensive upgrade despite the doubling of cores and threads they each sport. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990X has made an appearance on a Canadian retailer’s website with a price tag of $2,400 Canadian, or around $1,840 U.S..
Intel has dominated the top tier of desktop and mobile CPUs for the best part of a decade, but AMD’s Ryzen line, released in 2017, gave it some serious competition, especially in multithreaded settings. The prosumer end of the Ryzen spectrum, Threadripper, did more than that, offering comparable performance to Intel’s most expensive CPUs — some as expensive as $2,000 — for less than half the price. Threadripper 2 is expected to debut in the next few months and could do much the same, though it may not be anywhere near as cost effective.
Although far from confirmed as a launch price, the listing on Canada Computers — spotted by Videocardz — suggests that the top-of-the-line, 32-core, 64-thread Threadripper 2990X CPU would cost the equivalent of $1,840. That would make it the most expensive consumer-facing CPU AMD has released in a long time and a far cry from the past-generation’s Threadripper 1950X, which debuted at $1,000. Today, it can be found for as little as $775.
The price of the new chip is substantially higher than we were expecting, with early rumors suggesting the 2990X would debut at around $1,500. It could be that the Canada Computers’ listing is merely a placeholder — it has since been removed from the site.
While it was up though, other details in the listing confirmed that the 2990X will feature 32 cores and 64 threads and will have a massive 80MB of total cache. It will also make use of the same socket as the previous generation, the TR4, and will have a power-draw of 250w. As Wccftech highlights, the 2990X is expected to have a clock speed of 3.4GHz at its base, boosting up to as much as 4.2GHz on a reduced number of cores.
AMD’s new Threadripper CPUs are expected to debut in mid-August.
If you’re a big Intel fan, you could wait for its 28-core CPU, but as impressive as its 5GHz showcase was, it turned out to be a bit of a fantasy.
Editors’ Recommendations
- Huawei jumps on AMD’s Ryzen bandwagon via an upcoming 14-inch MateBook D laptop
- Bitcoin’s profitability called into question as energy consumption rises
- Laptop buying guide
- Acer Chromebook Spin 11 review
- Intel throws down a gauntlet with its 28-core extreme CPU