Is Threadripper better than Ryzen 9?

This sounds like an obvious question but it isn’t as clear cut as you might imagine. This really depends on which Threadripper you are comparing to which Ryzen 9. I’m writing this in Nov 2021. For the current generation of AMD CPUs there are 5 different Ryzen 9 CPUs and 8 different Thread ripper CPUs.

If you were to compare a slightly lower end Threadripper like the 3955WX with a higher end Ryzen 8 like the 3950X, you might see the Ryzen 9 winning in terms of single core tests and multi core tests. They both have the same number of cores (16) so the Ryzen 9 can compete here. If you were to instead compare almost any other Threadripper, they would probably win at least for multi-core performance since most of them have from 24 to 64 cores. Single core performance is another story though. At the end of the day it all depends on your workload and the type of processing that you will be doing.

The takeaway here is that the Threadripper is better if:

• You have a higher end version with more cores
• You care more about multi threaded performance