[lliamander]

Technically Ryzen 9 CPUs aren't HEDT, but between their high core counts, the amount of PCIE bandwidth on X570 (with PCIE 4), and the ability to (unofficially) use ECC RAM, the boundary between mainstream and HEDT is awfully blurry.

[TheGoddessInari]

Currently the super sharp line has to do with PCIe lanes and support for 8 DIMMs.

If you've gotten locked into needing that, you have no other options aside from not using hardware that you can currently slot.

AMD entirely eliminated the lower end HEDT parts and raised prices for TR3.

Intel has a nasty shortage, too.

Compare that to x99, which had an entry level msrp of just $350, but often went for exact same price as 7700k, significantly under $300.

HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases.

[lliamander]

> Currently the super sharp line has to do with PCIe lanes and support for 8 DIMMs.

That's exactly the area where I argue there is some fuzziness.

For PCIE lanes, it's true that AMD only has 24 lanes (4 of which dedicated for the chipset) but it has the equivalent of 48 PCIE gen3 lanes in terms of raw bandwidth. Now, it's still not as flexible as having that many actual PCIE gen3 lanes, but high-end x570 motherboards do support some level of bifurcation. You also need compatible devices, but we already compatible storage. There are a couple GPUs out now, but given the upcoming launches of RDNA2 and Ampere GPUs, I expect there will be plenty more compatible GPUs. X570 is somewhat limited now, but as more gen4 devices are released that chipset will only become more versatile.

For RAM, there you have another fuzzy spot. I mean sure, HEDT usually has 4 channels, but what does that mean in terms of memory capacity and bandwidth? Only within the last year or so have 32GB UDIMMs been available (iirc) so HEDT was limited to 128GB until very recently. And if you really need more, you can use an Optane storage device as a swap partition (It's been done before, it's fine). As for bandwidth, 2 channels is a bit of a limitation, but Ryzen does support faster memory, which can help bridge the gap a little bit to quad channel Intel parts running at lower RAM speeds.

I'm not saying that Ryzen + X570 is HEDT, but it's so darn close that I can understand why AMD chose not to produce low-end TR 3000 parts. Between Ryzen 9, TR 2000, Epyc 7002P, and limited use of TSMCs fabs, I think the move they made was smart.

> HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases.

I don't think it's a bad value prop overall. We have a $4000 CPU that's beating out two $10,000 CPUs (dual Xeon Platinums), which is a phenomenal improvement in value. I think we are in this weird space where, when trying to buy the system capabilities you need (in terms of cores, clock speeds, memory capacity, and expansion slots) you sometimes have to pay a bit extra for capabilities that you don't need. That's unfortunate and I hope next gen fixes that. However, it doesn't seem like AMD or Intel will have new HEDT parts for at least a year.