ASUS Preps AMD TRX40 Motherboards For 3rd Gen Threadripper Sharkstooth Zen 2 CPUs
Make no mistake, Threadripper is not dead. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed there will be at least one more round of Threadripper CPUs, based on the company's Zen 2 CPU architecture. In the lead up to the eventual launch, USB-IF has made references to three new chipsets for the upcoming Threadripper chips, those being TRX40, TRX80, and WRX80.
It's not yet clear how each chipset will differentiate itself from the others—it's possible that the TRX80 and WRX80 could have more DDR4 DIMM slots than TRX40, and perhaps more PCI Express lanes as well, though we're merely guessing. And while we are doing that, it's probably a safe bet the WRX80 chipset will be for workstation motherboards.
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Credit goes to Twitter user @momomo_us for discovering the entry, as shown in the screen above. USB-IF is the standards body that oversees the USB specification, so with regards to leaked information, this is about as reliable as it gets (other than an official announcement, of course).
To make things even more interesting, the folks at Videocardz claim to have found evidence of ASUS prepping a pair of motherboards based on the upcoming TRX40 chipset. The models include the ASUS Prime TRX40-Pro and ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming. We can surmise that neither are EPYC boards, due to the "TR" part of the chipset name, which presumably stands for "Threadripper."
What's also interesting is AMD appears to be moving away from the X_99 naming scheme. Prior chipsets for Threadripper include X399 and X299, and if AMD was going to stick with that nomenclature, we'd be looking at an upcoming X599 chipset. We are not ruling that out, but based on the USB-IF entries and the apparent boards ASUS has in the works, it looks like TRX40, TRX80, and WRX80 will be the direction AMD goes.
Like everyone else, we are excited to see what kind of performance third-gen Threadripper processor bring to the high-end desktop (HEDT) scene. Just yesterday, we reported on leaked benchmark results of a 32-core/64-thread Threadripper "Sharkstooth" CPU, which posted impressive scores. It's going to be fun watching AMD's next-gen Threaderipper CPUs and Intel's upcoming Cascade Lake-X processors duke it out.
