Market availability of the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X may be far away, given its September 2019 launch, but engineering samples (ESes) of the chip seem to be already in circulation. "uzzi38" on Twitter posted this spy-shot of a 3950X ES making short work of Cinebench R15. CPU-Z recognizes the chip by its codename "Matisse," and puts out the correct CPU core and thread count, but doesn't give a name-string. It also recognizes the MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE motherboard this test is run on.

The purported Ryzen 9 3950X ES, overclocked to 5.42 GHz, scores a gargantuan 5,501 points in the multi-threaded benchmark. To put this number into perspective, at stock frequencies, a Ryzen Threadripper 2950X (same core-count, double the memory bus width), scores 3,645 points. The 3950X benefits from not just its massive overclock that's over 1 GHz higher than the stock TR-2950X, but also higher IPC, and a more consolidated memory interface. This feat goes to show that AMD's upcoming Ryzen chips love to overclock, and deliver a significantly higher single-thread performance over the previous generation.

Computer Upgrade King demoed 2 new extremely powerful and colorful mATX gaming desktops at CES that release in Spring 2019. On display at Patriot's suite, they featured their Continuum Mini which has an intense infinity mirror front panel with large side vents to ensure excellent air flow. Inside, there was an NVidia RTX 2080 TI GPU and an Intel i9-9900K CPU with their own custom cooling system consisting of an RGB CPU water block, anodized brushed aluminum reservoir and pump combo, front mounted 240mm radiator and lotus style ARGB fans.

On display at AMD's suite, they featured their Stratos Mini which has a triple RGB fan front panel with metal blade design to ensure excellent air flow. Inside, there was a Gigabyte Vega 56 GPU, an AMD Threadripper 2950X CPU with their own custom cooling system, a Team Group T-Force Delta RGB SSD, and halo style RGB fans.

Tech Day slides leaked to the web by Kitguru provide a confirmation of how AMD is wiring out the additional two dies on the 24-core and 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2000-series MCMs on the socket TR4 platform. We had speculated that because the quad-channel DDR4 memory and PCIe interfaces are wired to two diagonally-opposite dies on AMD X399 chipset motherboards; in the interest of backwards compatibility, AMD could wire out memory and PCIe from just two out of four dies on the multi-chip module, and have the two additional dies seek memory and PCIe over the InfinityFabric interfaces.

The obvious trade-offs with this design choice is that latencies to the dies with indirect memory/PCIe access are higher, and that reflects heavily in AMD's own performance figures for comparing the 32-core 2990WX with the 16-core 2950X from the same generation. The 2990WX is "only" up to 64 percent faster than 2950X at Cinebench R15 nT, despite having double the number of cores. To its credit, the 2950X has higher clock-speeds (3.50 GHz nominal with 4.40 GHz boost) than the 2990WX (3.00 GHz nominal with 4.00 GHz boost). The presentation also puts out interesting bits of information such as AMD's own performance numbers showing 10-15 percent performance gains between the 2950X and the 1950X; and performance gains of the 2990WX over Intel Core i9-7980XE.

That didn't take long - from the moment we've put our eyes on AMD's premium packaging for their new Threadripper 2 lineup, we're getting images that slowly expose the workings and ritual of unboxing these feats of silicon, engineering, and human ingenuity. The original video has, in the meantime, been taken down, but of course, whatever hits the web, stays in the web, and screenshots abound that give us a taste of what to expect.

Hardware diagnostics and reporting utility HWBot has added preliminary support for AMD's upcoming Threadripper II CPU lineup, the high core-count, up to 32-cores and 64-threads monster CPUs. The 2990X is the cream of the crop with its full configuration, and its TDP is again being reported at 250 W, upwards 70 W from last generation's flagship 1990X - a 100% increase in computing resources that is accompanied by what can only be referred to a "very limited" 38% increase in reported TDP, whilst delivering a 3.4 GHz base clock.

The 2970X, which has a 24-core, 48-thread configuration, maintains the 180 W of the previous 16-core flagship, while the new "mainstream" (isn't it crazy to call a 16-core, 32-thread CU mainstream?) 2950X is rated at only 125 W compared to the same 180 W of previous-gen Threadrippers. Of course, TDPs do mean what they mean - and sometimes that is very little, especially when comparing across manufacturers - but it still puts in perspective how much AMD managed to improve not only core counts and density, but also power envelope, on TSMC's new 12 nm process.