After the launch of the Ryzen 3000 series and of course Rome, the other eagerly line of processors from AMD is the 3rd generation ThreadRipper processors, codename CastlePeak.
A little bonus tidbit – ThreadRipper wasn’t originally planned by AMD, instead, it started as a passion project by a group of engineers at the company. The original vision from AMD was to development Zen for the Ryzen CPUs, Epyc (and other things such as APUs), but a customer-focused HEDT platform hadn’t been planned from the start.
But, AMD’s X399 platform has been very popular with content creators, the current top-dog in the second generation ThreadRipper lineup is the 2990WX, sporting up 32 cores (64 threads thanks to SMT).
But there have been a few ‘Sharktooth” benchmarks which have popped up on GeekBench, with the model number “”AuthenticAMD Family 23 Model 49 Stepping 0”. These benchmarks were first discovered by Momomo_US.
The CPU is still 32-cores and 64-threads, but with a base frequency of 3.6GHz, and with 16x 8MB RAM. This would indicate that we’re dealing with the Zen 2 architecture, particularly given the frequencies and other specs don’t match up with either the first or second generation ThreadRippper processors.
The second generation Threadripper 2990WX has a base clock of just 3GHz, for reference.
There are two results, with the first scoring 5677 for the single-core and 94772 for multiple, with the other result scoring 5932 for Single and 93344 for multi.
We also see the system is loaded with 128GB of RAM (that’s a really good work station or a pretty decent machine to run Chrome with at least 10 tabs). Interestingly, the memory bandwidth here is way higher than the first or second-generation ThreadRipper. In memory bandwidth, the multi-core score is 54.8 GB/sec, with 31.3GB/s for the copy result.
I went to the GeekBench database and went for the fastest result in the database, which is a heavily overclocked score. The single thread is 5421, while the multi was 82678 points. The memory bandwidth though was significantly less, at just 38.5 GB/s bandwidth for multi-core, and the copy at just 20GB/s.
This indicates that the third generation has improved its bandwidth drastically with the IO die… though it will also be interesting if we see the inclusion of more memory channels or if they will stay at just quad channel.
Thanks to the IPC improvements in Zen 2 (which amounts to about 15 percent) and the IO die approach of ThreadRipper 3000 (which we can presume would be handled similar-ish to Rome), we can imagine there’ll be a rather nice improvement in the third generation CPUs.
In the above image we can see how the chiplets of Rome tie into the IO die, which then connects to PCIe and memory channels, versus the first generation Epyc. Of course, until we see an official announcement we can’t be certain that ThreadRipper 3rd gen has a similar-ish design.
Further, in an exclusive leak, I was told by a previously very reliable source that they expect 64-core ThreadRipper parts to be released based on the information they had. This source has given accurate info in the past (including the release date for Ryzen 3000), so while not a certainty it wouldn’t be a surprise if we see AMD redefine core count for the HEDT.
This also hasn’t been the first ThreadRipper 3000 leak, with one earlier this year sitting at only 16 cores and 32 threads, though it was on the UserBenchmarkDatabase.
