AMD teases 32-core chip, to be launched later this year

Threadripper 2 was unveiled at Computex in Taipei at AMD’s press keynote.

Cutting to the good bits, the 2nd generation Threadripper was confirmed, but the surprise was not just a 24-core CPU as we were expecting, but also the full 32-core announcement too. This means that both the companies will fight the war with their high end server-hardware in the end of 2018. For reference, the last-generation Ryzen Threadripper 1950X featured 16-cores and 32-threads. The company was sure to mention that it can run at 5GHz, dwarfing the likes of AMD’s current Threadripper CPU.

We’ve said this before in our high-core CPU reviews, but it bears repeating: The higher the core count, the more hard it is to load the full CPU or to find applications that won’t struggle to find meaningful differences. This breaks the previous industry record, which was set only yesterday when Intel introduced a 28-core PC processor during its own Computex demonstration. Now its time to take a look at AMD’s beast. But that single employee’s speed and efficiency would dramatically reduce when the workload started to get heavy.

Although we don’t know what their clock speeds will be, we do know that the new AMD chips will require quite a lot of power.

The beastly 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper has four 8-core Ryzen dies on-package connected with AMD’s Infinity Fabric.

In April, AMD reported first-quarter net income of $81 million on revenue of $1.65 billion, up 40 percent from a year ago.

AMD has said that the latest series of Threadripper will be based on 12nm Zen+ architecture. According to Engadget, the new Threadripper adopts the same 12nm Zen+ architecture used by its Ryzen chips. The event had earlier seen the introduction of new chips from Nvidia Corp. and Intel Corp., which will no doubt keep an eye on AMD’s latest entries into the market. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how Intel’s 28-core CPU could fetch a massive price when its released in Q4 2018.

At the press conference, Huawei didn’t disclose any information regarding the release date and pricing for the new AMD Ryzen-based 14-inch MateBook D though. “We are extremely excited about what Ryzen has done, but more importantly, about what Ryzen will do”, Su said.

It’ll likely cost more than the AMD’s current 16-core Threadripper CPU, which costs nearly $1,000 when they’re released later this year.