We all remember AMD’s 64 Core Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, the first 64-core HEDT chip. It competes with…well, no one. Intel’s closest part is the 18-core i9-10980XE but in most cases, it fails to keep up with even the Ryzen 9 3950X. An older 14nm node, lower clock speeds and terrible thermals make the Cascade Lake parts utterly incapable of competing with rival Threadripper chips. However, what if I told you that the 64 Core 3990X can run at a whopping 4.2GHz, not across all cores of course, but at least on the best 4-8.
There’s not a whole lot to see here, except how incredible AMD’s Zen 2 architecture really is. Thanks to TSMC’s cutting-edge 7nm process and a lot of liquid nitrogen, a 64 core CPU is able to hit a quad-core boost of 4+GHz. Although the majority of the cores are still running at around 2GHz, the faster cores will go a long way in boosting the performance in many applications, especially latency-sensitive ones.
