Hammers Intel's finest HEDT chip. Remember when having an eight-core CPU was considered firmly high-end desktop (HEDT) territory? It can be argued that AMD changed the notion of HEDT when it launched the mainstream 8C16T Ryzen 7 1800X in March 2017. The underlying Zen architecture was the genesis for greater core counts in 2017, leading to the 16C32T Ryzen Threadripper in August 2017.

Improvements in manufacturing processes at TSMC and greater know-how from AMD culminated in the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX in August 2018, which shoehorned 32 cores and 64 threads for the first time in a non-server environment. Just this month, moving the mainstream stack up to 16C32T via Ryzen 9 3950X has paved the way for greater-core Threadrippers that take advantage of the two major weapons in AMD's arsenal: Zen 2 architecture and 7nm process production.