AMD Threadripper 2 2990WX will also be a wallet-ripper at $1,835
Leaked prices for forthcoming AMD Threadripper indicates UK price of almost £1,700, including VAT
AMD's top-of-the-range Threadripper 2 2990WX workstation CPU has had a CA$2,399, excluding VAT (£1,400 - or £1,680 including UK VAT at 20 per cent) price slapped on it according to a listing on a Canadian computer commerce site.
The listing of the 32-core, 64-thread monster was briefly made by CanadaComputer - which mysteriously subjects visitors to its website to captchas before allowing them to peruse its wares - and picked up by the VideoCardz hardware enthusiasts' website. In addition, the listing indicated that the part offered a TDP of 250 watts, well above the anticipated TDP of 180 watts.
The Threadripper 2 2990WX is part of the 12nm Pinnacle Ridge family of second generation Ryzen processors, built on the Zen+ microarchitecture. The 250 watt TDP might test some current X399-motherboards.
The processor is expected to offer a base clock speed of 3GHz, with an all-core boost clock of 3.4GHz. Precision Boost, which boosts the clock speed of a one or more (but not all) cores, maxes out at 4GHz.
For enthusiasts that can't quite justify dropping the best part of £1,700 on a CPU, but still want a Threadripper, the 16-core, 32-thread Threadripper 2950X and 24-core, 48-thread 2970X will also become available at the same time.
The Threadripper 2 2990WX bested Intel in the two companies' game of one-upmanship during the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan earlier this year. That launch trumped Intel's 28-core Skylake-X Core i9 reveal just the day before.
In that Intel launch, the company had cranked the chip all the way up to 5GHz, although it was later revealed that Intel had used an industrial-grade cooling system to get it all the way up to 5GHz without melting down.
Jim Anderson, AMD's corporate vice president of the Computing and Graphics Business Group, described Threadripper 2 as offering "heavy metal performance", during the chip's reveal at Computex.