AMD Launches 16-Core Ryzen 9 3950X At $750, Beating Intel’s $2K 18-Core Chip

MojoKid writes: AMD officially launched its latest many-core Zen 2-based processor today, a 16-core/32-thread beast known as the Ryzen 9 3950X. The Ryzen 9 3950X goes head-to-head against Intel’s HEDT flagship line-up like the 18-core Core i9-9980XE but at a much more reasonable price point of $750 (versus over $2K for the Intel chip). The Ryzen 9 3950X has base and boost clocks of 3.5GHz and 4.7GHz, respectively. The CPU cores at the heart of the Ryzen 9 39050X are grouped into two, 7nm 8-core chiplets, each with dual, four-core compute complexes (CCX). Those chiplets link to an IO die that houses the memory controller, PCI Express lanes, and other off-chip IO. The new 16-core Zen 2 chips also use the same AM4 socket and are compatible with the same motherboards, memory, and coolers currently on the market for lower core-count AMD Ryzen CPUs. Throughout all of Hot Hardware’s benchmark testing, the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X consistently finished at or very near the top of the charts in every heavily-threaded workload, and handily took Intel’s 18-core chip to task, beating it more often than not.