10 PCWorld DECEMBER 2019NEWS AMD UNVEILS 32-CORE THREADRIPPER 3970X
Group’s V-Ray renderer.
The Core i9-9980XE isn’t Intel’s top
prosumer chip, though. The company
announced its new Core i9-10980XE at crazy-
low prices in early October (go.pcworld.com/
crex). While the older 18-Core i9-9980XE still
sells for $1,919 today on Amazon.com, the new
18-core Core i9-10980XE will sell for $979.
In a strange turn of events, with Intel’s
crazy price cuts in place, AMD’s new
Threadripper will occupy the higher ground
on pricing. If you use the overly simplistic
metric of dollar per thread, Intel actually has
an advantage in a Core i9 vs Threadripper
price match. Of course, from AMD’s point of
view, it probably thinks Core i9 can’t even
hang with its Threadripper anymore andwould rather see its $750 16-core Ryzen 9
3950X duke it out with Core i9 today.RYZEN 9 3950X: COMING
SOON, WITH ECO MODE
Here’s the other big announcement: The
long-awaited, slightly delayed 16-core Ryzen
9 3950X will go on sale on November 25, the
company said. Pinkie-swear. The CPU had
been expected in September, but was
pushed back to November. AMD has taken
that time to add a feature called Eco Mode.
Eco Mode will let you scale the CPU back
from its rated 105-watt TDP to 65 watts. There is a
performance cost: AMD said Eco Mode will get
you about 77 percent of the performance of the
standard mode, but at 44 percent of the powerEco Mode gets you 77 percent of the performance of the CPU at 44 percent of the power consumption of
the standard mode.