Threadripper Prices Ripped!

Details On Massive First-Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper Price Cuts Emerge

Ripped is a bit of an overstatement, but this is the first time that AMD has lowered the prices on these first generation Ryzen Threadrippers, and their prices can only come down further into the "bargain bin" category eventually. So long as Intel had the only fast chips on the market, they could charge as much as they wanted and keep their prices inflated, but we are now seeing the beginning of the end of single core performance wars. AMD chips are still not as fast and low latency as Intel chips, but they have closed the gap significantly enough to make PC gamers and a lot of other people very happy with prices that can easily add up to a $500.oo savings on a single chip and motherboard.

Note that the Threadripper 1920x is a 12 core processor perfect for photography, the occasional video transcoding, or whatever and countless other uses. For a gamer, its a good high end gaming processor that's dirt cheap and goes the extra mile for a lot of other things, as well as, the multitasking chip from hell. A chip like this one can run possibly four applications in the background if you want without spoiling your frame rates in games, which only require six cores at most. In other words, you can transfer all your files to an external hard drive, chat with gamers online, and so on, while you play without your frame rates taking a dive. Just a year ago, an Intel chip and motherboard capable of doing that would have cost three times as much, while AMD additionally designs their chip sockets to make them cheaply upgradeable for years to come, saving even more money in the long run.

The difference is, you don't get quite the speed and all the bells and whistles Intel provides, but if Intel survives their current specter security snafu, which just keeps coming back to haunt them over and over again, they will still no doubt find they have already lost a lot of business to AMD. Corporations and business often don't have a choice in the matter, having to rely and "Wintel" (Windows and Intel) for all their workloads, but having cheaper high powered chips from AMD means the rest of us poor slobs can do more with open source hardware and software as well. Once we have both cheap processors and graphics cards with 16 cores and roughly 14tf of compute power.

That's enough to run a small business, not to mention, enough to design and create your own video game, and then play it in 4k, and I would estimate the cost of such a computer, just the box, to drop around $800.oo sometime in the next five years. That's getting into the really reasonably priced category when we should expect widespread adoption and millions of people all designing and creating their own video games. Linux users in particular will want to use them, and Steam has even commissioned one group of Linux programmers to create a new version of wine capable of playing any video game, that will play in DX11. That's the open source dream come true, cheap-but-powerful hardware and software that is open source friendly and allows people to ditch Windows altogether, unless they have to play the latest and greatest games or whatever.

Valve's goal is to create a cheap opensource video gaming platform that Microsoft and Intel don't control, and their progress over the last five years has been seriously impressive. Almost everyone in the industry was shocked when they said they would do this, but it looks like it simply required a little more time and they are about to have the last laugh, along with AMD. So far, there are only a few dozen games adapted to the new version of wine, but by next year that should change, and we should see hardware prices drop even more dramatically, with any luck. Take out the added expense of Windows, Intel, and Nvidia, and gaming rigs could become seriously cheap within the near future.