AMD has already confirmed that it's releasing a second generation Ryzen Threadripper processor with 32 cores and 64 threads, and that it will arrive sometime in Q3. What we don't know are the exact specs or the product name. Certain details will have to wait, though in the meantime, the unreleased part has seemingly reared its pretty head at HKEPC.
There's no way of knowing if the information is legitimate, though it wouldn't be unusual for engineering samples to be out in the wild at this point. The article shows a CPU-Z screenshot that identifies the chip as a Threadripper 2990X, with a 3.4GHz base clock. It's also said to have a 3.4GHz all-core boost clock and 4GHz Precision boost clock.
A separate shot of the Task Manager indicates it's equipped with 3MB of L1 cache, 16MB of L2 cache, and 64MB of L3 cache—that's in total, so 32K/64K D/I L1 cache and 512KB L2 cache per core. In short, the 32-core/64-thread part serves up twice the number of cores and threads as AMD's Threadripper 1950X, and double the L3 cache, without jacking up the clocks.
HKEPC supposedly slapped a Corsair H150i Pro water cooler on the chip and managed to overclock it to 4.12GHz at 1.38V. It finished a Cinebench R15 run with a score of 6,399. To put that into perspective, we scored 2,917 with a Threadripper 1950X, and 4,061 with an overclocked Intel Core i9-7980XE (18 cores, 36 threads). Here are some more data points to compare:
We'll have to wait and see of HKEPC's numbers and data hold up, once we have a 32-core/64-thread Threadripper in-house to test. And of course it will be interesting to see how gaming performance shakes out. Threadripper and HEDT processors in general are not aimed at gaming, but for content creation and other tasks that can better utilize all those cores and threads.
There's still the matter of power. Intel's 18-core i9-7980XE uses a lot of power, much more than the 1950X, but doubling the number of cores might close that gap. There's also the price to consider. The Threadripper 1950X has 'fallen' to around $750. It wouldn't surprise us if AMD priced the Threadripper 2990X closer to two grand.
