New AMD Threadripper benchmark leak shows 3960X naming, welcome X79?

Since the Ryzen 3000 launch, everyone has been extremely excited to see how the 7nm ZEN 2 performance scales on HEDT. Well, it looks like the new chips are starting to break the surface.

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In a leak we picked up from the team over at Videocardz, we see that the Ashes of the Singularity database has a new result for a 24-core Threadripper titled 3960X. But, wait a minute. Some of you may be asking, wasn't there already a 3960X CPU? And to answer that question, yes, it was an X79/LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E variant from several years ago. It does seem weird that AMD would paint themselves into a corner with naming their new HEDT CPU in such a way, but this is a leak/rumor, for now, so we will treat it as such.

Either way, I think this only feeds the fire of excitement to see what the new Threadripper chips will offer. It will also be exciting to see what level of disruption it will add to the current and upcoming Intel X299 based parts. If it is anything like the existing mainstream platform, it will be significant, now onto another interesting leak that came up today.

This tweet came online, showing what appears to be the AMD master product list, which can sometimes have provisional entries for upcoming SKUs. The SKU listings are exciting as we see several entries of 280W rated CPUs. Do keep in mind Threadripper SKUs will be unlocked and much higher clocked than the ZEN 2 EPYC parts we have had information on for some time now.

The higher clocks, of course, means that the 'TDP' value should go up a bit, but do keep in mind a lot of this is preliminary spec. It is exciting, but we are cautiously optimistic as taming a large heat load pushes more users to need more cooling capacity, so it will be fascinating to see what the final SKUs will be and their specifications. Do you think we will see a 64-core Threadripper? Are you planning a 3rd gen Threadripper? If so, what do you plan to use all of those cores to do?