What is strange about pre-ordering hardware that might initially be in short supply?

Pre-orders don't make sense in the case of downloadable games, where there is no scarcity.

Pre-ordering a product that hasn't been reviewed and benchmarked means you could get something much worse than you expect. For example, there may be apps that can't take advantage of 32 cores so you could spend $1,800 to get no benefit.

Not to mention that with so many cores, if they want to read and write to disk, the disk is going to be a huge bottleneck.

Right, they could just pay the same money to get a 10-core processor from Intel.

you get bonuses and you get to annoy gamers.

that's 1 good reason to preorder, plus some bonuses that tend to be lame.

Are you implying you make poor financial decisions because you feel that it annoys other people?

> It doesn't talk about sockets but for sake of preorderers I hope it's compatible with original threadripper boards.

AMD has already committed to using the same socket until 2020.

This alone is a great reason to run AMD...

2020 is currently just 18 months ahead. In the consumer's pov that means close to nothing. Heck, I assume they would not be able to change within that time frame even if they wanted to.

The commitment was made over a year ago when Ryzen was first released. Basically it was a guarantee if you were going to upgrade you processor in the next 3 years you wouldn't have to get a new motherboard. A moderate upgrader would get 1 upgrade out of this deal, an aggressive upgrader (gets ever new chip), would get 3 upgrades. Someone who is conservative and only plans to upgrade ever 5 years or so would see no benefit. However, Intel seems to change the socket every. damn. time.

> Someone who is conservative and only plans to upgrade ever 5 years or so would see no benefit.

I disagree based on my personal experience. The CPU upgrade path for my current desktop computer ended roughly a year after I bought it, even though that CPU generation had been introduced very recently by Intel. I got a relatively high-end CPU, so upgrading to anything but the highest-end CPUs of that generation doesn't really make sense from a performance point of view. Yet those still cost a surprising amount of money today and offer worse performance than the midrange options of newer generations.

Simply put, extending the lifetime and thus upgrade path out by at least 150% means that the options available 5 years down the line will be 150% "better", even though no CPUs for that socket might even be in production anymore at that time. For me that seems like a significant advantage.

It's "compatible" in the sense that it plugs in and runs, but the 32-core processors are going to push the VRMs on all existing boards right to the limit, even at base clocks. After all, it's at least 70% more power than the first gen, and probably higher (most 2000-series Ryzens bust through their official TDP pretty readily).

Turbos are going to be pretty iffy under sustained load, let alone Precision Boost and XFR, which are (iirc) enabled by default.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKe7CnZT9ZE

AMD is shipping all the review kits with an unspecified "add-on VRM cooling kit" to try and help that, and there are second-gen X399 boards coming out with 16 phases (up from 6-8 in the first gen).