No way Threadripper and Xbox are getting Zen 3 earlier than Epyc. If that were to happen it's more likely a repeat of Zen+ with Epyc skipping it altogether.
Yeah, I assume Epyc would be sampling first, but the server market is a long sales cycle. There may be some fudging in the term "earlier". That said, I was already wondering if TR3 was going to be pushed out because of memory bandwidth/DDR5. If TR could get both DDR5 and local stacked memory/cache, there might be some benefit in waiting. If Zen2 doesn't deliver higher clocks, there's even less of a reason to upgrade to TR3 -- assuming memory bandwidth constrains the ability to take advantage of the greater fp throughput on hedt workloads (big if), and you also don't get significant per thread boost...? [looks ahead to next post .. hmm :| ] I've been planning an upgrade, but I've been starting to have concerns anyway....
I don't see SM3|4 being attractive on anything other than Epyc. And questionable even there. Even on servers, latency matters. If I could have 20% higher clocks (lower latency) or 20% greater throughput (higher SMT), I'd take the lower latency on TR and desktop every time. I could go either way on servers, depending on what I ran on them. I/O tasks might do well with more lower latency threads. But I'm not putting business logic on those cores. Even then, a lot of data access is computation (serde).
As for the 16-core "leak", as long as I'm referencing the post.... I'm not going to lie, 3.3/4.2 would be a miss for me. I'd never expect 16 cores to boost too high, but single core boost needs to be higher, and the base is under 2950x's, so that pair in a TR3 isn't going to be too attractive. Of course, I've been assuming that Zen2 would disappoint the 5Ghz expectations about as soon as they started floating around, and that we'd get 24 and 48 core models in TR3 because of tdp constraints; we don't know what the base/boost of the 12c chiplet would be, we don't know if that rumor is at all tied to reality, etc :shrug: But a 4.2 limit? That would be not swell.