AMD today unveiled the pricing and availability for Threadripper, its high-end desktop platform that was unveiled in May.

The top-end part will be the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is a 16 core, 32 thread chip with a base clock of 3.4GHz and a boost clock of 4.0GHz. It will be priced at $999. The 1920X chip will feature 12 cores and 24 threads. It will be clocked at and will retail for $799.

Both chips will use AMD's TR4 socket, which has 4094 pins, and are compatible with the X399 chipset, offering 64 lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity and four channels of DDR4 memory. Both have a power envelope of 180W.

Essentially, AMD has doubled up version of the existing Ryzens. The chip internally has a unit of eight cores with 16 threads. Threadripper has two of these chips in each package, while the Epyc server processor has four.

AMD hopes that the new processors will competeeffectively with Intel's recently released Skylake-X platform. On the Intel side, $999 gets you 10 cores, 20 threads, at 3.3 to 4.5GHz, with 44 PCIe lanes. Intel's $599 chip offers eight cores, 16 threads, at 3.6 to 4.5GHz, but with only 28 PCIe lanes.

AMD has an advantage in terms of core count and I/O bandwidth. Intel, in contrast, has better per-core performance and higher clock speeds. So you can expect Threadripper to perform better in workloads that can take full advantage of all those threads, but it could fall behind Intel's chips in single-threaded workloads.

Threadripper processors and motherboards will become available in early August. Dell will be taking pre-orders for its Alienware Area 51 system with Threadripper on July 27.

AMD has also announced specs and availability of its low-end Ryzen 3 chips. The Ryzen 3 1300X will offer four cores, four threads, at 3.5 to 3.7GHz. The Ryzen 3 1200 is a four core, four thread chip running at 3.1 to 3.4GHz. They'll both go on sale on July 27. AMD did not provide pricing details.