AMD unveils 16-core Threadripper processor

AMD’s annual press conference at Computex 2017 was held a few hours ago. AMD brought its best product to today’s event, giving the PC-centric Computex trade show a chance to improve relationships with its business partners, which is crucial for AMD’s survival in the competitive CPU market. Computex is not a place to introduce complex technical achievements, but it is a good place to clarify AMD’s roadmap.

AMD introduced its 16-core Threadripper processor for the high-end desktop and workstation market a few weeks ago at its Financial Analyst Day event, but AMD is now slowly releasing information about the Threadripper chip to build momentum ahead of its summer launch.

AMD confirmed during today’s conference call that the 16-core, 32-thread Threadripper processor will be half the size of an Epyc server processor for some reason; so AMD’s dual-link MCM chip will feature 4 DDR4 channels and 64 PCIe lanes, all of which will be active for all Threadripper models.

Of Threadripper’s PCIe lanes, 60 will be dedicated directly from the processor to power PCIe and M.2 slots, while the other 4 will be routed to the chipset (and then an unspecified number of lanes will be taken back out of the chipset) to power basic I/O, USB, and other features. AMD seems to be putting a lot of emphasis on Threadripper’s PCIe lane count, as Intel’s Core i9 processors only have 44 PCIe lanes, and none of the sub-$1,000 models in the series have all lanes enabled.

But AMD has introduced the X399 chipset for Threadripper processors, and at this point it seems that Intel and AMD are even competing in naming, as Intel yesterday introduced the X299 chipset for its Core i9 series processors. There is not much information available about AMD’s new chipset at the moment, but given that Threadripper is so close to the launch of Ryzen processors, it seems unlikely that there will be any fundamental differences between the Ryzen and X399 chipsets.

AMD also shared information about its 32-core Epyc server processor with 128 PCIe lanes; this processor, which is considered AMD’s most promising server product in the last decade, will be available on June 20th.