Ahead of the annual Supercomputing 2018 conference next week, Intel today announced part of its upcoming Cascade Lake strategy. From a report: The company teased plans for a new Xeon platform called Cascade Lake Advanced Performance, or Cascade Lake-AP, this morning ahead of the Supercomputing 2018 conference. This next-gen platform doubles the cores per socket from an Intel system by joining a number of Cascade Lake Xeon dies together on a single package with the blue team's Ultra Path Interconnect, or UPI. Intel will allow Cascade Lake-AP servers to employ up to two-socket (2S) topologies, for as many as 96 cores per server.

Intel chose to share two competitive performance numbers alongside the disclosure of Cascade Lake-AP. One of these is that a top-end Cascade Lake-AP system can put up 3.4x the Linpack throughput of a dual-socket AMD Epyc 7601 platform. This benchmark hits AMD where it hurts. The AVX-512 instruction set gives Intel CPUs a major leg up on the competition in high-performance computing applications where floating-point throughput is paramount. Intel used its own compilers to create binaries for this comparison, and that decision could create favorable Linpack performance results versus AMD CPUs, as well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: For the last few weeks, I've been performing the same battery test over and over again on 13 phones. With a few notable exceptions, this year's top models underperformed last year's. The new iPhone XS died 21 minutes earlier than last year's iPhone X. Google's Pixel 3 lasted nearly an hour and a half less than its Pixel 2. Phone makers tout all sorts of tricks to boost battery life, including more-efficient processors, low-power modes and artificial intelligence to manage app drain. Yet my results, and tests by other reviewers I spoke with, reveal an open secret in the industry: the lithium-ion batteries in smartphones are hitting an inflection point where they simply can't keep up.

"Batteries improve at a very slow pace, about 5 percent per year," says Nadim Maluf, the CEO of a Silicon Valley firm called Qnovo that helps optimize batteries. "But phone power consumption is growing up faster than 5 percent." Blame it on the demands of high-resolution screens, more complicated apps and, most of all, our seeming inability to put the darn phone down. Lithium-ion batteries, for all their rechargeable wonder, also have some physical limitations, including capacity that declines over time -- and the risk of explosion if they're damaged or improperly disposed. And the phone power situation is likely about to get worse. New ultrafast wireless technology called 5G, coming to the U.S. neighborhoods soon, will make even greater demands on our beleaguered batteries. If you want a smartphone that excels in battery life, you pretty much have two options: Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 and Apple's iPhone XR. According to The Washington Post's tests, the iPhone XR and Note 9 topped the list with times of 12:25 and 12:00, respectively.

The world's largest neuromorphic supercomputer, the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker), was just switched on for the first time yesterday, boasting one million processor cores and the ability to perform 200 trillion actions per second. HotHardware reports: SpiNNaker has been twenty years and nearly $19.5 million in the making. The project was originally supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), but has been most recently funded by the European Human Brain Project. The supercomputer was designed and built by the University of Manchester's School of Computer Science. Construction began in 2006 and the supercomputer was finally turned on yesterday.

SpiNNaker is not the first supercomputer to incorporate one million processor cores, but it is still incredibly unique since it is designed to mimic the human brain. Most computers send information from one point to another through a standard network. SpiNNaker sends small bits of information to thousands of points, similar to how the neurons pass chemicals and electrical signals through the brain. SpiNNaker uses electronic circuits to imitate neurons. SpiNNaker has so far been used to mimic the processing of more isolated brain networks like the cortex. It has also been used to control SpOmnibot, a robot that processes visual information and navigates towards its targets.

The tablet market has now declined year-over-year for 16 quarters straight. According to new estimates from IDC, "Q3 2018 saw an 8.6 percent year-over-year decline: 36.4 million units shipped worldwide, compared to 39.9 million units in the same quarter last year," reports VentureBeat. From the report: The only silver lining is that the Q3 2018 decline wasn't double digits again. While 2017 quarters only saw single-digit declines, Q1 2018 and Q2 2018 were in the double digits. The estimates come from IDC, which counts both slate form factors and detachables, meaning tablets with keyboards included. Apple maintained its top spot for the quarter, with Samsung and Amazon rounding out the top three. Huawei was the only company in the top five to ship more tablets than the year before. The top five vendors accounted for 68.4 percent of the market, up from 67.1 percent last year.

General Motors is planning to bring two new electric bikes to the market in 2019; one will be folding and the other will be compact. TechCrunch reports: The bikes will be "smart" and "connected" and somehow inspired by GM's OnStar, the company's subscription-based communications, in-vehicle security and emergency services feature found in cars. Hannah Parish, director of General Motors Urban Mobility Solutions, wouldn't elaborate what that might look like. We'll have to wait until next year. The bikes are also equipped with safety features including rechargeable front and rear LED lights. And the electric propulsion on the bikes were designed by GM engineers who created a proprietary drive system. For now, GM is focused on naming the e-bikes. And it's turning to the public to help. The company launched a brand-naming campaign Friday as part of its broader e-bike announcement. The company launched a website where people can suggest names for the e-bikes and have the chance to win up to $10,000.

Can researchers built a new kind of battery powerful enough to fuel an electric airplane? MIT's Technology Review profiles a company co-founded by MIT materials science professor Yet-Ming Chiang: He and his colleague, Venkat Viswanathan, are taking a different approach to reach their next goal, altering not the composition of the batteries but the alignment of the compounds within them. By applying magnetic forces to straighten the tortuous path that lithium ions navigate through the electrodes, the scientists believe, they could significantly boost the rate at which the device discharges electricity. That shot of power could open up a use that has long eluded batteries: meeting the huge demands of a passenger aircraft at liftoff. If it works as hoped, it would enable regional commuter flights that don't burn fuel or produce direct climate emissions...

The initial plan is to develop a battery that could power a 12-person plane with 400 miles (644 kilometers) of range -- enough to make trips from, say, San Francisco to Los Angeles, or New York to Washington. In a second phase, they hope to enable an electric plane capable of carrying 50 people the same distance.... Last year, the company announced plans to deliver a line of "hybrid to electric" aircraft with room for 12 passengers in 2022. At launch, the company intends to offer a hybrid plane with a gas turbine and two battery packs capable of flying around 700 miles (1,127 kilometers), as well as an all-electric version with three battery packs and a range of less than 200 miles....But crucially, the plane itself is expected to feature an open architecture that allows owners to switch out these modules over time, enabling them to upgrade to better batteries developed in the future or shift from hybrid to all-electric operation.
About 2% of the world's CO2 emissions come from air travel, and it's one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse-gas pollution. "More than a dozen companies, including Uber, Airbus, and Boeing, are already exploring the potential to electrify small aircraft," the article points out, "creating the equivalent of flying taxis that can cover around 100 miles (161 kilometers) on a charge. The hope is that these one- or two-passenger vehicles -- in most cases envisioned as autonomous vertical takeoff and landing aircraft -- could shorten commutes, ease congestion, and reduce vehicle emissions."

But with less ambitious batteries, "these would largely replace car rides for the rich, not displace air travel."

Long-time Slashdot reader Zorro shared this article from Bloomberg: Not long before he died, tech visionary Paul Allen traveled to the south of France for a personal tour of a 35-country quest to replicate the workings of the Sun. The goal is to one day produce clean, almost limitless energy by fusing atoms together rather than splitting them apart. The Microsoft Corp. co-founder said he wanted to view the early stages of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in Cadarache firsthand, to witness preparations "for the birth of a star on Earth." Allen wasn't just a bystander in the hunt for the holy grail of nuclear power. He was among a growing number of ultra-rich clean-energy advocates pouring money into startups that are rushing to produce the first commercially viable fusion reactor long before the $23 billion ITER program's mid-century forecast. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Peter Thiel are just three of the billionaires chasing what the late physicist Stephen Hawking called humankind's most promising technology.

Scientists have long known that fusion has the potential to revolutionize the energy industry, but development costs have been too high for all but a handful of governments and investors. Recent advances in exotic materials, 3D printing, machine learning and data processing are all changing that. "It's the SpaceX moment for fusion," said Christofer Mowry, who runs the Bezos-backed General Fusion Inc. near Vancouver, Canada. He was referring to Elon Musk's reusable-rocket maker. "If you care about climate change you have to care about the timescale and not just the ultimate solution. Governments aren't working with the urgency needed."

The company Allen supported, TAE Technologies, stood alone when it was incorporated as Tri-Alpha Energy two decades ago. Now it has at least two dozen rivals, many funded by investors with a track record of disruption. As a result, there's been an explosion of discoveries that are driving the kind of competition needed for a transformational breakthrough, according to Mowry.
The article reports one fusion company founded last year by six MIT professors is "confident they'll be able to produce a prototype of a so-called net energy reactor by 2025."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: For years, analysts and journalists watching Apple have talked up the growing importance of services, as opposed to hardware sales, to the company's top line. But it's only now that Apple's business model truly appears to be shifting toward collecting rent from the company's ecosystem and increasingly relying on gadget sales to perpetuate this rent rather than drive growth. Apple's decision to stop reporting iPhone unit sales underscores the shift. Services have been steadily growing in importance for Apple since 2016, while the share of revenue provided by the flagship gadget, the iPhone, has gone up and down depending on the popularity of different models.

There's a lot of potential for Apple to squeeze a higher rent directly out of its captive user base. Goldman Sachs estimates that only 10 percent of Apple's user base pay for iCloud Storage; in terms of price and service quality, iCloud has been a poor competitor to services provided by Google and some smaller companies such as Dropbox, but that only means Apple can increase revenue from it exponentially if it bothered to compete more aggressively, as it does with another key service, Apple Music. Even that streaming service has relatively low penetration, though, with only about 35 million users last year. Goldman Sachs predicts that number will grow to 83 million by 2020. Goldman's proposal for Apple is to create a services bundle similar to Amazon Prime; for $30 a month or so, subscribers would get access to music, video, 200 GB of storage and phone repair. The investment bank calculates that with just 50 million subscribers, such a bundle could add $18 billion in services revenue in 2019. "Rent extraction from a user base that finds it hard to go away may sound a bit like extortion," Leonid Bershidsky writes in closing. "But it's more honest and upfront than extracting data from users in ways they often don't understand and then making money off the data, as Facebook does. That honesty is in itself a competitive advantage for Apple as it gradually reimagines itself as more of a services company."

The challenge, Bershidsky writes, "is to grow the services offering fast enough to make up for potential iPhone revenue losses; gadget prices cannot keep going up forever without hurting the top line, and in the end, a phone is just a phone. We only need it to gain access to all the nice digital stuff out there."

Yesterday, during the company's Q4 earnings call, Apple's chief financial officer Luca Maestri said the company will no longer report unit sales of its main hardware divisions, including iPhones, iPad, and Mac. "This is the same as protocols Apple already follows for its smaller devices, such as the Apple Watch, AirPods, and HomePod, which are bundled under the 'Other Products' category," The Verge reports. From the report: The announcement comes after iPhone unit sales percentage was unchanged year over year, despite a revenue bump of 29 percent. The decision to stop disclosing unit sales is because that figure is "not representative of underlying strength of our business," Maestri said. "A unit of sale is less relevant today than it was in our past," he says, adding that unit sales increase are still a clear part of Apple's goals. While unit sales may not accurately represent Apple's business performance, it's a figure that analysts and journalists have used to calculate a product's average selling price. For example, that number can provide insight into how well different iPhone models are selling, as newer iPhones like the XS, XS Max, and XR are priced higher than older models like the now-discontinued SE, 6S, and 6.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On Thursday, Russian officials held a press conference to reveal that they have determined what caused last month's Soyuz mid-flight failure. The culprit: a damaged sensor on one of the rocket's four boosters responsible for stage separation. With the investigation complete, the officials announced that they will move up the date of the next crew launch to the International Space Station. Russian space agency officials confirmed that the faulty sensor, designed to signal stage separation, had caused one of the boosters to improperly separate. This led the first and second stages of the rocket to collide, which then triggered the vehicle's emergency abort system.

Video of the incident, released today by the space agency, shows the accident from the rocket's point of view. In it, the booster in question strikes the core of the rocket, causing a significant jolt, which triggered the abort. According to officials, the afflicted sensor rod was bent slightly during the assembly of the rocket. To check for any handling errors that might have also affected other rockets, Russian officials said that all assembled Soyuz rockets -- and their attached booster pack -- will be taken apart and put together anew.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For decades, health experts have struggled to determine whether or not cellphones can cause cancer. On Thursday, a federal agency released the final results of what experts call the world's largest and most costly experiment to look into the question. The study originated in the Clinton administration, cost $30 million and involved some 3,000 rodents. The experiment, by the National Toxicology Program, found positive but relatively modest evidence that radio waves from some types of cellphones could raise the risk that male rats develop brain cancer. But he cautioned that the exposure levels and durations were far greater than what people typically encounter, and thus cannot "be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience." Moreover, the rat study examined the effects of a radio frequency associated with an early generation of cellphone technology, one that fell out of routine use years ago. Any concerns arising from the study thus would seem to apply mainly to early adopters who used those bygone devices, not to users of current models.

The lowest level of radiation in the federal study was equal to the maximum exposure that federal regulations allow for cellphone users. That level of exposure rarely occurs in typical cellphone use, the toxicology agency said. The highest level was four times higher than the permitted maximum. The rodents in the studies were exposed to radiation nine hours a day for two years -- far longer even than heavy users of cellphones. For the rats, the exposures started before birth and continued until they were about 2 years old. Some 2 to 3 percent of the male rats exposed to the radiation developed malignant gliomas, a deadly brain cancer, compared to none in a control group that received no radiation. Many epidemiologists see no overall rise in the incidence of gliomas in the human population. "The study also found that about 5 to 7 percent of the male rats exposed to the highest level of radiation developed certain heart tumors, called schwannomas, compared to none in the control group," the NYT reports.

It's worth nothing that the rats were exposed to radiation at a frequency of 900 megahertz, the frequency used in the second generation of cellphones that prevailed in the 90s, when the study was first conceived. For comparison, fourth generation (4G) and fifth generation (5G) phones employ much higher frequencies, which are "far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats," the NYT reports.

Apple is introducing a new "Repair Vintage Apple Products Pilot" program that will extend the period of time customers can receive repairs for older devices. "The new program at first will include the iPhone 5 and other Apple products that are about to become obsolete, and in the coming weeks will add more products to the list for devices that previously lost repair support," reports 9to5Mac. Some of the devices that will be included on the list include the iPhone 4s and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2012). From the report: Apple has long had a 5-7 year lifespan for repairing its products, meaning that owners of an iPhone, iPad or Mac can have repairs performed through Apple or an authorized service provider even when not under warranty. Usually after 5-7 years, products are then classified as "vintage" or "obsolete" (depending on the country and local laws) and Apple staff no longer offers parts or repairs. The company maintains a list of products that are classified as vintage and obsolete on its website.

For the new Pilot program, Apple will only be offering repairs for vintage devices based on part availability. Otherwise customers will be told that inventory isn't available because the product is considered vintage. So the new program doesn't guarantee you a repair, but it's a nice change from Apple's previous policy where it stopped offering repairs entirely after classifying devices as vintage.

System76 is ready to share specifics about its new computer. From a report: There are three models from which to choose, and all three can apparently be configured with with Intel or AMD processors. This is refreshing news, as historically, System76 machines were an Intel-only affair. AMD has been more friendly to the Linux community over recent years, so I am happy to see System76 giving that option too.

1. Thelio (Up to 32GB RAM, 24TB storage) treks through tasks with ease despite its compact footprint.
2. Thelio Major (Up to 128GB RAM, 46TB storage) boasts stellar performance, allowing maximum configurability with up to 4 GPUs to tackle the most astronomical projects.
3. Thelio Massive (Up to 768GB of ECC Memory, 86TB storage) is the epitome of performance among workstations, offering maximum throughput and accuracy for demanding computational workloads.

Pricing starts at $1099.99, but that will obviously increase based on the specs you choose. Keep in mind, however, the computer will not ship until December. Full specs in the story above. In a statement, the company said, "Thelio Systems are designed to be easily expandable, making personalizing the computer a tantalizingly easy process. Slip in drives, add memory, and upgrade graphics cards at will. Additionally, the open hardware design that Thelio is built upon allows the user to easily learn how their computer works and make modifications using this information. Customization is simple to ensure that the computer encompasses people's needs, as well as their personality."

MIT researchers have devised a way to train semantic parsers by mimicking the way a child learns language. "The system observes captioned videos and associates the words with recorded actions and objects," ZDNet reports, citing the paper presented this week. "It could make it easier to train parsers, and it could potentially improve human interactions with robots." From the report: To train their parser, the researchers combined a semantic parser with a computer vision component trained in object, human and activity recognition in video. Next, they compiled a dataset of about 400 videos depicting people carrying out actions such as picking up an object or walking toward an object. Participants on the crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to wrote 1,200 captions for those videos, 840 of which were set aside for training and tuning. The rest were used for testing. By associating the words with the actions and objects in a video, the parser learns how sentences are structured. With that training, it can accurately predict the meaning of a sentence without a video.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Deep learning has a DRAM problem. Systems designed to do difficult things in real time, such as telling a cat from a kid in a car's backup camera video stream, are continuously shuttling the data that makes up the neural network's guts from memory to the processor. The problem, according to startup Flex Logix, isn't a lack of storage for that data; it's a lack of bandwidth between the processor and memory. Some systems need four or even eight DRAM chips to sling the 100s of gigabits to the processor, which adds a lot of space and consumes considerable power. Flex Logix says that the interconnect technology and tile-based architecture it developed for reconfigurable chips will lead to AI systems that need the bandwidth of only a single DRAM chip and consume one-tenth the power.

Mountain View-based Flex Logix had started to commercialize a new architecture for embedded field programmable gate arrays (eFPGAs). But after some exploration, one of the founders, Cheng C. Wang, realized the technology could speed neural networks. A neural network is made up of connections and "weights" that denote how strong those connections are. A good AI chip needs two things, explains the other founder Geoff Tate. One is a lot of circuits that do the critical "inferencing" computation, called multiply and accumulate. "But what's even harder is that you have to be very good at bringing in all these weights, so that the multipliers always have the data they need in order to do the math that's required. [Wang] realized that the technology that we have in the interconnect of our FPGA, he could adapt to make an architecture that was extremely good at loading weights rapidly and efficiently, giving high performance and low power."

dmoberhaus writes: In one of the strangest system admin tales of all time, one IT guy details how a new MRI machine managed to disable every single iPhone, Apple watch and iPad in a medical facility while leaving the rest of the devices untouched. Eric Woolridge, a system administrator at Morris Hospital in Illinois, said in a detailed post on the r/sysadmin subreddit that helium was to blame for the malfunctioning iPhones. "[T]he MRI installation involves supercooling the giant magnet in the machine by boiling off liquid helium," reports Motherboard. "This evaporated helium is usually pumped out of the facility through a vent, but this vent was leaking the helium into the rest of the facility. In all, about 120 liters of helium (or about 90,000 cubic meters in its gaseous state) was pumped out of the MRI room and an untold amount leaked into the rest of the hospital."

In a blog post, iFixit notes that helium atoms can wreak havoc on MEMS silicon chips. "MEMS are microelectromechanical systems that are used for gyroscopes and accelerometers in phones, and helium atoms are small enough to mess up the way these systems function," reports Motherboard. What's odd is that Android phones were not affected. Apparently, the reason "is because Apple recently defected from traditional quartz-based clocks in its phones in favor of clocks that are also made of MEMS silicon," reports Motherboard. "Given that clocks are the most critical device in any computer and are necessary to make the CPU function, their disruption with helium atoms is enough to crash the device."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Buried in Apple's latest range of MacBooks -- including the MacBook Pro out earlier this year and the just-announced MacBook Air -- is the new T2 security chip, which helps protect the device's encryption keys, storage, fingerprint data and secure boot features. Little was known about the chip until today. According to its newest published security guide, the chip comes with a hardware microphone disconnect feature that physically cuts the device's microphone from the rest of the hardware whenever the lid is closed. "This disconnect is implemented in hardware alone, and therefore prevents any software, even with root or kernel privileges in macOS, and even the software on the T2 chip, from engaging the microphone when the lid is closed," said the support guide. The camera isn't disconnected, however, because its "field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed." Apple said the new feature adds a "never before seen" level of security for its Macs, without being quite so blunt as to say: Macs get malware too.

Apple is turning its attention to a range of devices it has not upgraded in recent years. Alongside the new MacBook Air that the company unveiled on Tuesday, it is also upgrading the Mac Mini for the first time in four years, and also has a new iPad Pro in the offering. Regarding the new Mac Mini: It has Intel's 8th generation processors -- in four- and six-core i7, i5, and i3 flavors -- and 60 percent faster graphics. The processor's paired with up to 64GB of RAM (8GB comes on standard) at 2666MHz and up to 2TB of SSD storage -- double the capacity of previous Mac Minis. Overall, it's up to 5 times faster than the previous-gen models, Apple claims, and can drive 4K and 5K Thunderbolt displays and output in three formats. In terms of ports, there's plenty to go around: two USB-A, HDMI 2.0 video, four Thunderbolt USB-C, an audio out port, and a Gigbabit Ethernet port (you can add up to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, if you so choose). Also onboard is Apple's T2 chip. It's a 64-bit ARMv8 chip -- a variant of Apple's A10 -- that runs Apple's custom BridgeOS 2.0 operating system (an Apple watch derivative). The new Mac Mini starts at $799. Regarding the new iPad Pro: After months of rumors, Apple has today announced a completely redesigned iPad Pro with slimmed-down bezels, Face ID, a USB-C port, and far more powerful specs than its predecessor. Just like prior years, the new iPad Pro comes in two screen sizes: 11-inch and 12.9-inch. The 11-inch model has essentially the same proportions as the prior 10.5-inch model. And the 12.9-inch model puts the same-sized display into a much smaller form factor. The new iPad Pro starts at $799 for the 11-inch and $999 for the 12.9-inch. Preorders begin today and it ships November 7th. The new Pro is the company's first iPad not to include a home button, which allowed Apple to extend the screen vertically for a much more immersive experience. The bezels have been downsized on all four sides. [...] But something else has been removed, too: the headphone jack. There's no 3.5mm port visible on any of the device's sides, meaning that buyers will need a USB-C-to-headphone dongle to listen to music through wired headphones. The 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $799. The 12.9-inch version starts at $999. It goes on sale today and ships on November 7.

Apple is currently investigating a report that Apple Watch supplier Quanta Computer relied upon illegally employed students to help manufacture the company's exceedingly popular wearable. "Originally brought to light by The Financial Times, the report details how dozens of students were ostensibly working as interns, but in reality were working assembly line shifts, often throughout the night. Some students even reported working six days a week in 12-hour shifts," reports BGR. From the report: The allegations stem from a report put together by SACOM, a workers rights group based out of Hong Kong. In compiling its report, SACOM notes that it interviewed upwards of 28 students. The FT report reads in part: "The alleged abuses echo the labour violations uncovered last year in Apple's iPhone supply chain at its Foxconn Zhengzhou factory, where both Apple and Foxconn acknowledged that student interns had illegally worked overtime. The two companies said at the time that they would end the practice of student interns working extra hours." In a statement on the matter, Apple said that it is "urgently" looking into the aforementioned claims and that they have a "zero tolerance" policy for companies who try to skirt around Apple's workplace guidelines.

MojoKid writes: AMD launched its line of second generation Ryzen Threadripper CPUs over the summer, but the company offered 16-core and 32-core versions of it only at the time. Today however, the company began shipping 12-core and 24-core versions of the high-end desktop and workstation chips, dubbed Ryzen Threadripper 2920X and 2970WX, respectively. All 2nd Generation Ryzen Threadripper processors feature an enhanced boost algorithm that came with AMD's Zen+ architecture that is more opportunistic and can boost more cores, more often. They also offer higher-clocks, lower-latency, and are somewhat more tolerant of higher memory speeds. All of AMD's Ryzen Threadripper processors feature 512K of L2 cache per core (6MB total on the 2920X and 12MB on the 2970WX), quad-channel memory controllers (2+2), and are outfitted with 64 integrated PCI Express Gen 3 lanes. The new Ryzen Threadripper 2920X has a 180W TDP, while the 2970WX has a beefier 250W TDP. In highly threaded workloads, the Threadripper 2920X outpaces a far more expensive 10-core Intel Core i9-7900X, while the 24-core / 48-thread Threadripper 2970WX is the second most powerful desktop processor money can buy right now. It's faster than Intel's flagship Core i9-7980XE, and trailed only AMD's own 32-core Threadripper 2990WX. Pricing for the new chips falls in at $649 for the 12-core 2920X and $1299 for the 24-core Threadripper 2970WX.