Skip to main content

AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper gets its first benchmark results — and it’s fast

Ryzen Threadripper
Image used with permission by copyright holder
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.

Recommended Videos

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.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

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.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

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.

Mark Coppock
Mark Coppock is a Freelance Writer at Digital Trends covering primarily laptop and other computing technologies. He has…
AMD and Intel have formed a coalition to fight off Qualcomm
An Intel executive holding a Lunar Lake CPU.

AMD and Intel are teaming up. Shocking, yes, but the two giants who duke it out over the making the best processors are joining forces as the leaders of the new x86 ecosystem advisory group, the stated mission of which is "bringing together technology leaders to shape the future of the world’s most widely used computing architecture."

For those of you that get sufficient vitamin D, x86 is an instruction set architecture, or ISA. It's been around for nearly 50 years, and it's the bedrock of modern computing. An ISA dictates how a CPU reads and executes instructions. AMD and Intel may be fierce rivals, but they are the two major companies producing x86 processors today. Although AMD and Intel are leading the group, an ensemble of massive tech companies have also joined, including Microsoft, Google, HP, Dell, Broadcom, Lenovo, and Oracle.

Read more
The launch of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D feels very close — and it might disappoint
AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X3D sitting in the box.

We may not talk about feelings much when discussing the best processors, but a mountain of leaks and rumors have been swirling about AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7 9800X3D -- and they're becoming too big to ignore. The most recent development is a post on the Chiphell forum (via Wccftech) that claims the processor will be announced on October 25, with a release in the first week of November.

On its own, this isn't anything too exciting. We see claims about hardware launches all the time, but the past two weeks have been riddled with murmurs about what is undoubtedly AMD's most-anticipated CPU this generation. Just a few days ago, a leaked slide from an internal MSI presentation pitted the Ryzen 7 9800X3D against last-gen's Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and showed anywhere from a 2% to 13% improvement. The slides were originally shared by HardwareLuxx, but the post was removed, suggesting the images were probably real (VideoCardz has the images archived).

Read more
AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D may not give Intel any breathing room
The Ryzen 7 7800X3D installed in a motherboard.

The competition between Intel Arrow Lake and AMD Zen 5 hasn't been as fierce as usual, with both lineups delivering small gen-to-gen improvements. However, it seems that AMD may soon add a staple to its list of the best processors, and the CPU might be announced at the worst possible time for Intel. I'm talking about the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which now has a rumored release date alongside some performance benchmarks.

The release date speculation was initially shared on Bilibili, but the user has since deleted their post. However, the discussion continued on Chiphell forums, spilling the beans on both the official announcement date and the possible release date.

Read more