This year's biggest processor war is nearly upon us as both AMD and Intel gear up for several high-profile launches in what could be a fascinating three-way battle. Mainstream Ryzen as well as high-end desktop Threadripper and Cascade Lake-X processors are expected to do battle and the thrilling thing is, no one's entirely sure who will win.
The products in question span both mainstream and high-end platforms and could see some major shifts in market share for either company, although admittedly it's probably AMD that has the greatest potential for coming out on top.
With the Ryzen 9 3950X being the last of 2019's major mainstream launches for AMD on its Socket AM4 platform - delayed back in September until this month - at first glance it might seem late to the party. However, it's not really the likes of Intel's Core i9-9900KS that the new CPU is taking aim at. It's Intel's high-end desktop parts, namely the Core i9-9980XE and has already caused Intel huge headaches thanks its 16 cores expected to perform similarly to Intel's $2000 CPU, but for less than half the price.
Intel has responded in the only way it can - drastically cutting prices for its new Cascade Lake-X CPUs, also due out this month. While they offer more PCI-E lanes and memory channels than the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, in terms of raw power, the AMD CPU packs a punch and could even equal Intel's 18–core CPUs at stock speed. In addition, the Ryzen 9 3950X has the highest boost frequency of any 3rd Gen Ryzen CPU of 4.7GHz (assuming it reaches this) so it will be an excellent all-rounder that will be quick in games and lightly-threaded tasks too.
In short, it will be a fascinating battle to see who comes on top here and it's worth remembering to factor in the platform costs too. For instance, Intel X299 motherboards can be had for reasonable amounts of cash and are possibly cheaper than equivalent X570 motherboards depending on your requirements so while AMD will have the upper hand with processor pricing, Intel might still be on par once you factor in the system cost.
Then, of course, we have 3rd Generation Threadripper. AMD has likely ditched everything below 24 cores due to the fact its Ryzen 9 3950X eats so far into its own Threadripper line-up. The expected 24 and 32-core CPUs will replace the Threadripper 2990WX and 2970WX, both of which offered stunning performance for the cash, but only in select software geared towards workstations. For general content creation and gaming, they lacked support, optimization and general grunt, but it remains to be seen just what the Zen 2 architecture has done to boost performance and lower latencies with Threadripper this time around. Any gains here will make life extremely difficult for Intel's high-end desktop line-up as well as its Xeon CPUs.
It does have one disadvantage, though, which stems from what I mentioned earlier about pricing. AMD is sadly retiring X399 motherboards and they will not be compatible with 3rd Gen Threadripper. This means that the new chipsets being used, specifically TRX40, will require new motherboards and these will be PCI-E 4.0 compatible. It's likely, then, that they'll demand a pretty big price tag, pushing Threadripper beyond the usual realms of high-end desktop price and performance, but it's unknown yet just how good all-rounders the CPUs will be. Will they have the same clout in games as the Ryzen 9 3950X and Intel Cascade Lake-X? Or are we looking at workstation-class products here again? All will be revealed by the end of the month.