TECH TALK
AMD Kills Off Non-Pro Threadripper
HEDT (HIGH-END DESKTOP) platforms once reigned as the fastest CPUs available, targeting enthusiasts who wanted more. Intel created the HEDT space with socket LGA1366 in November 2008, and for a while the Core i7- 920 was one of the best enthusiast processors. It was the first consumer four-core/eight-thread CPU, running at 2.66GHz base and 2.8GHz boost.
Jarred Walton
© AMD
The thing is, you could crank the voltage up a bit and set the BCLK to 190/191MHz and suddenly you had a chip running at 4GHz.
From 2009 until 2017, Intel didn’t bother selling mainstream desktop CPUs with more than four cores to the masses. If you wanted something better, you had to move up to HEDT. There were six-core Gulftown CPUs in 2010, Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E stayed with six cores but moved to quad-channel DDR3 memory controllers, and Haswell-E increased the core count to eight in 2014, swapping to DDR4 at the same time. Broadwell-E and the Core i7-6950X topped out at ten cores and 20 threads for a staggering $1,723 in 2016.