An AMD report detailing the features and specifications of the next Threadripper Pro 5000-series CPUs was leaked towards the end of last week. All five models will offer dual-socket functionality, according to the company. Two Threadrippers surfaced in the PassMark database shortly after, having completed the benchmark in dual-socket mode, but they weren’t from the 5000-series.

Instead, they were two of the 3000-series’ seventeen-month-old flagship: the 3995WX. Because the CPU shares hardware with the twin-socket-capable Epyc 77×2-series, the 3995WX has only ever been blocked from using dual sockets due to software limitations.

The two CPUs scored 123,631 points when they worked together, which is 35 percent higher than the median result of a single 3995WX and the greatest score of any two-CPU pairing in the database. If the finding is genuine, as it appears to be, there’s only one possible culprit: AMD. It’s simply too unlikely that someone else could properly change the two CPUs, each of which costs $8,800, and the necessary motherboard.

The release of the first dual-socket sWRX8 motherboards for the 5000-series has sparked some issues concerning backward compatibility, which is our best estimate as to why AMD would be experimenting with their old CPUs. Although AMD doesn’t have much of an incentive to produce one, a microcode update might theoretically enable dual-socket capabilities in 3000-series CPUs.

At the very least, AMD has an incentive to allow dual-socket support on the 5000-series processors. In the past, doing so would have resulted in the Epyc series being displaced; it’s one of the key aspects that distinguishes the two product lines. However, by 2022, the Epyc series will be a complete “generation” ahead of Threadripper, and will at the very least use a newer architecture, if not a newer node.

The aforementioned study, which was collected by Igor’s Lab, contains the majority of the accessible information about the 5000-series. Igor’s Lab is a reliable source, albeit its contents haven’t been verified beyond a few cross-references with previous breaches. However, specifications can alter in the weeks leading up to a processor’s launch.

According to Igor’s Lab, the CPUs are now only available in Pro (with a “W”) variant. There are five this year, up from four last year; the 24-core model was added.

The specifications of these processors, on the whole, aren’t too different from those of their predecessors. In certain situations, their all-core clock speeds are a few hundred megahertz higher or lower, but they are often identical. Only their single-core clock speed has increased from 250 to 350 MHz.

The largest upgrade, like the Ryzen 5000-series, lies behind the hood: the Zen 3 architecture. It could deliver a 10-20% IPC performance boost in many applications, according to our testing. Higher-core-count models may benefit even more from their remarkable inter-core and cache latency, which is substantially improved over the Zen 2 architecture of the 3000-series.

But, if it happens, it’ll most likely be the dual-socket feature that drives sales. It’d be fascinating to see what 128 unlocked cores might accomplish.