The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, released today, performed excellent in the reviews. With 64 cores and 128 threads, it was completely reasonable to assume this monster of a processor would only be suited for some specialized applications. And that’s a little bit true: It’s not the strongest gaming processor, or the strongest in single threaded workloads. But with some exceptions it is still strong in those - which is surprising.
In games, which tend to focus on single threaded performance, it sits a bit below the Threadripper 3970X, but still above the AMD Ryzen 5 3600:
See the individual benchmark results here, they also show some of the games in which the processor performs badly.
In application performance it is the strongest processor in the benchmark, with a vast distance:
Of course, no one will or should buy the Threadripper 3990X for gaming, it costs $4000. That part of its performance just shows that its cores are not that weak - this is again no FX processor, which makes it more viable for software that is not that completely parallelizable. Still, in the end the 3990X is really strong only when it can use those 128 threads. They give it excellent results in modern software benchmarks. It would be a great choice for cpu heavy applications, like professional render workstations.