AMD today officially announced some more details on its brain-child and market-stormer Ryzen Threadripper HEDT line of CPUs. Ryzen is a true new stand-alone architecture for AMD, the result of more than four years of careful planning and silicon design towards reaching a truly scalable, highly-flexible, non-glued together MCM design that could power all experiences and workloads through a single architecture design. The Ryzen architecture is already powering desktops with Ryzen 3, 5 and 7 desktop CPUs; has extended to server-side deployments through its EPYC line-up and will begin shipping for professionals with Ryzen PRO starting in Q3 2017. Also announced was that it will find its way to mobile APUs around Q4, paired with the new Vega graphics microarchitecture; and will even power professional-geared mobile solutions in 1H18. But more immediately, it's coming to the HEDT market. And AMD is putting that fight in the hands of Threadripper.

AMD pits its HEDT line-up to developers, researchers, prosumers, creators, and even multi-tasking gamers. Increased compute capabilities with up to 16 cores and 32 threads; larger memory footprint, increased I/O and storage, and support for many more GPUs and PCIe lanes ensure a stable, impressive platform for today's large data sets and tomorrow's exponentially more resource-intensive workloads. AMD will execute this with a three-pronged approach. There will be three processor models on offer for their HEDT platform. The $999 TR 1950X and $799 TR 1920X are known quantities already, with their respective 16 cores (32 threads) and 12 cores (24 threads). The new addition, however, comes in the form of the $549 TR 1900X, which offers not only 8 cores (16 threads) and 3.8 GHz base, 4.0 GHz boost clocks, but a clear upgrade path within AMD's new platform. Say what you will about AMD's offerings and execution, one thing is for sure: Zen and all the silicon it powers have prompted a reshuffle of the CPU landscape as we hadn't seen in years. Coincidence? AMD doesn't think so.AMD's promise with Threadripper is deceivingly simple: leverage an architecture that was built to be scalable, and provide great yields through the pairing of core complexes with a high-speed data interconnect (Infinity Fabric), and scale down or up from there. Gone are monolithic dies. In are a higher core and thread counts at a price significantly lower than Intel's offerings.More cores aren't exactly an automatic performance win, as we've seen with AMD's Bulldozer architecture and derivatives. The company re-engineered that slightly ahead of its time and relied too much on software support and workload optimization, which kinda never happened. With the new architecture focusing more on working well on existing solutions the result is an architecture that delivers the highest IPC in AMD's history, sips power gently, and can, according to AMD, edge the competitor's offerings by as much as 55% when comparing similarly-priced TR 1950X and Core i9-7900X. For a lower price tag you get up to 19%, thanks to a higher core-count (TR 1920X vs Core i9-7900X.) And for users who want a clear upgrade path in the future, AMD is offering the ability to invest $549 in an 8-core, 16-thread socket TR4 processor, enabling an upgrade path down the line to users that require the increased gruff.A new CPU with an absent ecosystem, however, won't achieve much; a CPU can hardly be seated alone inside a HEDT box. As such, AMD has taken steps to ensure availability of a healthy ecosystem at launch, with some of the world's most recognized motherboard manufacturers having top of the line products based on the X399 chipset ready already. The cooling solutions available for these monster chips are nothing to be scoffed at, either, featuring some 20 liquid cooling solutions that are TR4-compatible at launch (from companies such as Corsair, Arctic, EKWB, NZXT, Thermaltake, Cryorig, and EVGA (mainly Asetek-produced units), as well as at least five air cooling options from Arctic, Noctua, and Coolermaster. And let's not forget boutique system integrators which will keep AMD's Threadripper in a premium package - AMD has partnered with Alienware for such a system.Availability is the old question; and now, we have answers, directly from AMD themselves. You can pout your hands on Threadripper's highest core-count processors as soon as August 10th, in the form of the 1950X and 1920X HEDT CPUs. If those are a little too rich for your pocket (or for your particular core-computing HEDT needs), the $549 TR 1900X will be available at the end of the month, on August 31st. Pre-orders through retailers and boutique OEMs will be available starting tomorrow, July 31st.We also got a better look at the Ryzen Threadripper retail packaging today, which looks very fancy and has an unlock wheel at the back. We will never know how much, if at all, this packaging added to the product cost relative to a more simple cardboard box but the petty little person inside me appreciates it and wants to unbox Threadripper more now. So perhaps it was worth it after all.