A mysterious tweet from Gigabyte today may have some clues about the naming for the new chipset for the upcoming AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 CPUs.
The teaser clearly is hinting at the plethora of MOSFETs for VRM phases, but that’s not quite what we’re interested in. The CPU socket is clearly blacked out, but a couple of mounting points are visible leading us to believe that the board Gigabyte tweeted a photo of is using the socket for AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000.
Looking a little deeper, in the top right corner of the motherboard you can see some text that looks like it reads "99 AORUS XTREME." It's possible it says "89 AORUS XTREME," but the former is more likely.
This is clearly a HEDT (high-end desktop) motherboard, and we’re quite confident it’s an AMD board based on what we can see from the socket. The rumor mill's been working hard on upcoming Threadripper 3000 boards (Gigabyte already accidentally leaking four of its motherboards).
The problem is that so far, almost all the rumors have pointed to AMD’s Threadripper 3000 chipset being called TRX40 (or TRX80 and WRX80 for even higher platforms). However, Gigabyte's board looks like it has a “99” where its chipset name would be.
It wouldn't be too much of a surprise to see AMD's Threadripper 3000 chipset named X499 or X599 though, given that AMD's first and send generation Ryzen Threadripper chips run on the X399 chipset. But making this even more confusing is the fact that makes it all confusing is that Intel's current HEDT chipset is X299.
This leaves us with more questions than it does answers. We suppose it's possible that AMD is looking to beat Intel to grabbing the X499 or X599 name. It's also plausible that TRX40 is simply an engineering name that many people assumed would be the official chipset name.
Of course, another option is that we're not looking at an AMD board at all. But we'd be very surprised because the socket mounting points look far too similar to the existing TR4 socket.
We’ve spent over an hour trying to figure this one out in our newsroom but ended up just going in circles. Who can tell me what’s going on?
