AMD Threadripper 2920X

Twelve cores of pure unadulterated joy

- Zak Storey

WHEN THE FIRST SAMPLES of the early Threadripper processors ventured out into the wilds of the technology journo landscape, we were blown away. The high-end desktop processors were unlike anything we’d ever seen. They were incredible, with 16 cores and 32 threads, all for a little under a grand. AMD had slapped Intel’s high-end CPUs in the face, and made them take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror. We’d expected as much. The Infinity Fabric design, the modular core complexes, the EPYC server arsenal—it was all lining up to create a perfect storm in which these high-end consumer parts could make some serious headway into the market.

The thing is, they weren’t perfect. They had their niggles. Memory compatibility, latency issues, slow single-core clock speeds—the Threadripper lineup was hardly bereft of problems. If plug-and-play was the name of the game, Intel was still king, and the Core i97900X—although 12 threads down in comparison—still provided the best option for the high-end, power-hungry, plug-and-play enthusiast.