> around $1k or more?

I'd expect closer to $4000 or more.

> is this for the consumer line or server line of products?

Neither or both. Threadripper has high-clocks (like consumer) and high-core counts (like servers). It'd be for "workstations".

This is commonly referred to as the "HEDT" category, or "High End Desktop"

It's somewhere between the extreme enthusiast market and the workstation market. It's not _truly_ a workstation product as those will instead typically use Xeon or Epyc for things like full official ECC support & other such features. Threadripper muddies this line a bit as it does actually have official ECC support, but motherboard support is not as reliable as you'll find in Epyc boards.

Intel also has products in this category like the i9-10980XE - which is an 18-core product that's essentially the consumer version of a Xeon chip with ECC removed. Intel calls this their X-series line. And then since Intel removes ECC support, you'll again not really find this in workstations.

It's basically "take the server product, remove (some/most) of the server features, jack the power budget to the fucking roof because you can assume water cooling, and allow overclocking" line of products.

The 64-core 3990x is MSRP $4000. I’d expect this new fangled 3995WX to be that much or more.

CPU and motherboard prices aren't really relevant since RAM is so expensive. And only real reason for getting this instead of 3990x is that you need e.g. 1 terabyte of RAM. https://www.amazon.com/Tech-12x128GB-2933MHz-PC4-23400-288-P...

Saying a $4k USD CPU's price is irrelevant because 128GB DIMMs are expensive is absurd. There is no reason to think everyone who buys one is going to be spending $12k on RAM.

There might be some other cases for less ram. If the rumor that it supports rdimm or lrdimm modules is true then it could enable much easier ecc support since there are not a lot of ecc udimm options out there

Mostly ECC UDIMMs are limited in clock speed, but many can be comfortably overclocked. I presently have four 2666 MHz ECC UDIMMs overclocked to 3200 MHz in my TRX40 workstation (M391A2K43BB1-CTD if anyone is curious).

Do the RAM sticks require separate cooling?

No. For the most part heat spreaders on RAM are a gimmick (unless you’re pushing really high OC, which this is not).

I had no problem finding ECC UDIMMs for my TR build. Sure, not that many options but you only need one.

What workload do you have in mind?

Scientific computing is what I would be interested in for these types of hardware.

And as comparison, the 12-core is $500 and the 16-core is $750, both currently available for 10-15% off.

Those are not Threadrippers. IMO AMD misses one market segment where people want workstation CPUs but not so much cores. I would consider 12-16 core Threadripper with 4 memory channels and more PCI-E lanes with adjusted price.

They're not threadrippers but there's not an enormous difference. The equivalent 16-core EPYC has an MSRP that's only 10% more than the desktop chip. The whole stack has similar pricing around core count and performance.

And yeah there is a bit of a gap there. You could always get a low end EPYC but then you miss out on the turbos.

Threadripper is the consumer line, epyc is for servers.

Refinement: Threadripper is for professional consumers.

Threadripper is the "enthusiast" level of the consumer line, I've seen many gamers buy Threadripper.

AMD use this term themselves.