As the CPU wars continue to heat up, both Intel and AMD have some crazy-fast processors coming soon. Intel will be shipping its Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X processors starting this month, and AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper monster is coming in the summer in Dell’s Alienware Area-51 Threadripper Edition.
So far, while we have some of the specifications for the new chips, performance benchmarks have been lacking. That’s slowing changing, as it tends to do prior to a new component’s release, as people test the chips and those results accidentally get uploaded to various sites. That’s exactly what happened with AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper, which now appears to have a Geekbench test to look at, as Hexus.net reports.
Someone running a 16-core Ryzen Threadripper on an ASRock X399 motherboard tested the configuration using Geekbench 4.1.0. The results were uploaded and are quite fast indeed.
As Hexus.net mentions, these are likely unoptimized results, and while they compare well against other high-end processors today there’s likely still lots of room for improvement. By comparison, an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X at 3.6GHz with eight cores and 16 threads scored 4,208/23,188 and quad-core, eight-thread Core i7-7700K at 4.2GHz scored 5,805/19,942.
We’ll get our first look at a shipping system equipped with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper in the Dell Alienware Area-51 Threadripper Edition that’s due this summer. That machine will offer up to triple-GPU options and up to 64GB of fast DDR4-2,933MHz RAM. We don’t know pricing yet for AMD’s highest-end processors, but the equivalent Intel Core X-Series CPUs cost as much as $1,000 and so we’re likely looking at an expensive machine.
Even if you’re an Intel fan, you have to love the impending release of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper. Competition is a good thing, and whatever pushes Intel to release faster chips at reasonable prices does nothing but push the industry forward. Once AMD releases its upcoming Vega GPUs, the options for building a superfast gaming system will likely be better than they’ve ever been.
