Rumors about a new series of Ryzen chips arrived with force last Tuesday, but that same day AMD held its “Financial Analyst Day”, and the information shared during that meeting basically confirmed the existence of the processors. The official name is Ryzen Threadripper, and in addition to the 16-core monsters, there will be APU variants aimed at ultraportables and All-in-One systems before the end of the year.
16 cores, 32 threads. What do we need such performance for? Actually, that's the wrong question. What we really want to know is why they took so long to offer something like this. Personally, I welcome this new core race. Sooner or later, software will know how to use them fully, and the hardware needs to be ready. Intel slept for a long time wrapped in the sheets of 4C/8T, but we must admit that the lack of competition didn't force the company to go further. With Ryzen's debut, that changed. Everything indicates that Intel is already working on its Core i9 processors, and rumors about Ryzen 9 didn't take long to arrive… although it's better to say “ex-rumors”, because AMD has already confirmed them.
The difference is that they are not called Ryzen 9, but they adopted their internal code name, Threadripper. Their specifications (which, by the way, still need to be verified) are available in the previous article, but the Threadripper ceiling remains at 16C/32T. Those who want even more power (?!?) can jump to the new Epyc series, a name for what we previously knew as Naples. Being hardware destined for servers, finding things like 32 cores, 64 processing threads, 128 PCI Express lanes, and support for 16 channels of DDR4 on dual-socket motherboards definitely sounds good.
On the other end, things are also very interesting. First, AMD reported that Ryzen 3 processors will hit the shelves in the third quarter of 2017. Then, the first mobile APUs based on the new architecture promise a 50 percent increase in CPU performance, and 40 percent in graphics, courtesy of Vega. The APUs will be 4C/8T, and will debut before the end of the year. To close, AMD will offer “commercial solutions” under the Ryzen PRO brand. The announcement only describes workstations, silicon-level security, and flexible management support. When? Between the rest of 2017 and the first half of 2018.
