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The 1950X cost $1000 2 years ago, and it looks like you can pick them up for $500 now. Both are 16 cores with two chiplets.

1950X advantages:

  - 4 memory channels vs 2
  - 64 PCIe lanes vs 16-4-4
3950X advantages:

  - 64MB of L3 cache vs 32MB
  - DDR4 3200 vs DDR4 2666
  - The PCIe lanes are 4.0 vs 3.0
  - 3.5Ghz base clock vs 3.4
  - 4.7Ghz boost clock vs 4.0
  - 15% better instructions per clock
  - Full avx2 instead of emulating with two 128-bit units
  - 105W vs 180W TDP
The 3950X sounds like quite the improvement! Definitely a great deal IMO.


The biggest difference between the 2 imo is that TR4 boards have 8 DIMM slots whereas Ryzen maxes out at 4 even with X570 afaik.

Ryzen 3000 specs say it can support 128GB of ram but it’s hard to find 32GB DIMMs on the market.

So if you’re trying to build a workstation with lots of ram and more than one GPU, the Ryzen boards are too limited even if you’re willing to buy a nice one.


I think they've got the market segmented decently. Ryzen's the consumer chip after all, and it's high end configuration boarders on prosumer for sure.

I feel like if you're requiring 128GB of ram and/or maxing out the PCIE then you're going to have a bigger budget and ThreadRipper makes more sense.


Crucial makes 32GB DIMMs with ECC memory, not sure if non-ECC. Many Ryzen mobos accept ECC memory.


> Full avx2 instead of emulating with two 128-bit units

Just a note: Two units for fused multiply-add, otherwise it's four units with two multipliers and two adders.




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