AMD Q4: 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, Threadripper Up To 32-Core 3970X, Coming November 25th
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTTRX40: More High-End Motherboards for TR3
The new sTRX4 socket will be paired with a TRX40 chipset – a design that AMD says comes from an in-house team and built on GlobalFoundries 14nm. The new chipset, updated from the previous X399 in this space and even updated from the X570 in the consumer space, is the other half in the CPU-to-chipset bandwidth story. By using a PCIe 4.0 x8 link, AMD is removing almost any practical bandwidth limitation downstream from the CPU.
The new TRX40 chipset will come with a degree of modularity.
From the chipset, we can see motherboard manufacturers afforded a full PCIe 4.0 x8 slot, up to another x8 lanes as two x4 connections or further bifurcated, or instead of those bifurcated lanes, either four or eight more SATA ports. That’s 8 SATA ports on top of the four already present on the chipset.
So I like these modular systems. It allows motherboard manufacturers to go crazy with offering potential systems. For example:
| Potential TRX40 Variants | |||||||
| AnandTech | CPU | Chipset | |||||
| TRX40 SATA Powerhouse 20 drives |
x48 for PCIe slots | x8 for downlink | 8x SATA from options | x8 for dual NVMe | 8x SATA from options | 4x SATA from chipset | |
| TRX40 NVMe Powerhouse 18+ drives |
x48 for PCIe slots | x8 for downlink | dual NVMe from options | x8 for dual NVMe | dual NVMe for options | - | |
So that would be a motherboard with x16/x16/x16 (or x16/x8/x16/x8) in terms of PCIe 4.0 slots, a single x8 slot for a pair of NVMe drives, and then TWENTY SATA ports, all directly supported on the system without any additional controllers.
If SATA isn’t your thing, then the same arguments could be made for 48 PCIe lanes and six PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe slots, making a total of 18 high capacity PCIe 4.0 drives. The fact that AMD has put more PCIe lanes into their high end desktop platforms, plus this amount of modularity, wants me to play Dr. Frankenstein.
To be fair, those ideas are a bit extreme. Motherboard manufacturers will likely have to partition off a few lanes for 10 GbE networking, perhaps Thunderbolt, or maybe something more exotic like a RAID controller, or an RGB controller.
As noted in some of our previous news posts, motherboard manufacturers have been slowly leaking names of their TRX40 products. At this point in time we have seen mentions of the following:
- ASRock TRX40 Creator
- ASRock TRX40 Taichi
- GIGABYTE TRX40 AORUS XTREME
- ASUS Prime TRX40 Pro
- ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme
- MSI TRX40 Creator
- MSI TRX40 Pro 10G
- MSI TRX40 Pro Wi-Fi
We expect details of some of these to perhaps be announced today, or on the 25th when the CPUs come to market. GIGABYTE has even been showing previews of their motherboards on social media, with one showing an obscene number of power phases, and we’ve seen images of boards with 8 SATA ports. We’ll have our usual motherboard overview article up on that date, and we’ll be looking at reviews of these motherboards through the new year.
I will address comments about potential TRX80/WRX80 motherboards which have been put into the ether as potential other chipsets being launched. When asked, AMD said that the only chipset they are launching today is TRX40.
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Spunjji - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
Upgrading to a new Intel CPU also requires buying a new motherboard, and you'll only need to change RAM if you're going from DDR3 to DDR4 or your DDR4 is old and slow.Basically, AMD is a better value option and AM4 still has a potential upgrade path to Zen 3. Sounds like your "uninformed" comment is projection.
martinbrice - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
I'm really curious how the 3960X and 3970X might game. Sounds like architecturally with the single I/O die, they shouldn't suffer from the NUMA issues of the 2970WX or 2990WX. They're (essentially or precisely?) the same chiplets as the 3900X, but have a greater IHS surface area. Their advertised boost is competitive with 3900X, it'll be a matter of what they can hold as a steady state. They also have a larger cache.It'd be great if we could get all the benefits of the extra cores, PCIe lanes, and memory channels, without having to significantly sacrifice gaming performance.
Total Meltdowner - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
I was wondering the same thing. I game on an 1800x just fine at 1440p... This tr3 boosts 500mhz higher with about the same base clock...jospoortvliet - Sunday, November 10, 2019 - link
... and much better IPC. I would expect the TR's to beat your 1800x easily.abufrejoval - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
Adjustable cTDP is a godsent, but only if it is run-time adjustable (not just a fixed setting in the BIOS as with some older APUs) and preferably with command line and API: That allows you to really tune the hardware between energy efficient batch processing and fast interactive response times, especially when you can take cores offline similarly at run-time to make sure you hit high-frequency points consistently with the remaining ones (and re-enable them later).That would then turn most of the hundreds of fixed allocation SKUs Intel is selling into "CPU as code".
Of course these cTDP limits would have to be very closely observed (or be adustable), so you can control power vs. temperature limits, depending on if you want to allocate PSU overcapacity to increase boost speeds while there is thermal capacity or if you want a PSU that is energy optimzed, but has few reserves.
M O B - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
Why are the TRX40 motherboards all the same? Why aren't there different roles being played out with all of those PCIe lanes the motherboard manufacturer's are being given? Please make a motherboard for those of us who need lots of PCIe lanes and aren't just for gamers.With the TRX40 boards I see 4x PCIe slot on almost every single board--total. Some have a 5th slot, but is a x1.
I have been waiting for something like the X299 WS SAGE/10G to come out on the AMD side for more than a year, but apparently that day will never come.
Hammer_Man - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
The slide with the Threadripper prices, reads "New TRX40 Platform With 88 PCIe® 4.0"88 Lanes?
Dose the Chipset use a MUX och do the CPU have all those lanes?
DigitalFreak - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
They're probably playing the Intel game of adding the PCIe lanes on the CPU and the chipset together.Death666Angel - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
What's not to understand? It talks about the TRX40 platform, which is the chipset and the CPU as a whole and the article shows quite nicely what can be configured how. The CPU has 48 + 8 + 4 + 4 (=64) and the chipset has 8+8+4+4 (=24) which is the 88 number they come up with. 16 of those area already in use for the chipset communication, so 72 can be made available to the use however the motherboard manufacturer choose (as seen on the "AMD TRX40 Platform" slide). This isn't rocket science.pkv - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
Very disappointed by two things:(1) lack of retrocompatibility with x399
(2) no clear upgrade route for a setup with 16c/32t; from 1950x (999$) one could go to 2950x (899$); but now there's a 50% premium to go to the first TR40 offering (3960x 1399 $).
Going to 3950x+ x570 is not a solution when you need the pcie lanes provided by TR4.
@Ian: did you hear anything about a future 16c TR 3000, which would overlap with the 3950x obviously ? (Intel has done so in the past, mixing up HEDT and mainstream)