Anti-what? Leaks of Intel's Core i9 series suggest that the Santa Clara giant plans to respond furiously to the advance of Ryzen, basically by throwing more cores onto the desktop, but nothing stops AMD from doing the same. That said, the first details about Ryzen 9 have already appeared, a special high-performance series based on the SP3r2 socket derived from the Naples server processors. In its maximum configuration, the Ryzen 9 will offer 16 cores and 32 processing threads, crushing any multi-threading benchmark in its path...
As I said yesterday: there's a core race on the horizon. The decision to participate is logical if we consider that the benefits of miniaturization are increasingly smaller. Intel had the technology from the beginning, but it took Ryzen's presence in the market to wake processors from their slumber. The rumor mill has spread the Core i9 news in all directions. Of course, we must wait for official confirmation, but something tells us things aren't so quiet in Santa Clara's halls. The best part is that AMD hasn't been sleeping either. The Ryzen platform as a whole can only keep advancing, and the next box has a name: Ryzen 9.
The first details began to circulate last week, suggesting a new platform called Whitehaven. The technical differences are very important (44 PCI Express lanes, quad-channel DDR4), to the point that AMD will use another socket, the SP3r2, based on the SP3 destined for servers. While it's a bit frustrating to receive information about a new socket when AM4 has barely fired its first rounds, it's exactly the same strategy Intel will apply with Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X, using its LGA 2066. The complete list of revealed processors is as follows:
The leaked lineup
- Ryzen 9 1955: 3.1 / 3.7 GHz, 10C/20T, 125W
- Ryzen 9 1955X: 3.6 / 4.0 GHz, 10C/20T, 125W
- Ryzen 9 1956: 3.0 / 3.7 GHz, 12C/24T, 125W
- Ryzen 9 1956X: 3.2 / 3.8 GHz, 12C/24T, 125W
- Ryzen 9 1976X: 3.6 / 4.1 GHz, 14C/28T, 140W
- Ryzen 9 1977: 3.2 / 3.7 GHz, 14C/28T, 140W
- Ryzen 9 1977X: 3.5 / 4.0 GHz, 14C/28T, 155W
- Ryzen 9 1998: 3.2 / 3.6 GHz, 16C/32T, 155W
- Ryzen 9 1998X: 3.5 / 3.9 GHz, 16C/32T, 155W
With such TDP values, it's not absurd that the Turbo mode of the Ryzen 9 never exceeds 4.1 GHz. However, all this should be taken with a grain of salt. The Ryzen 7 leaks weren't far from the real data, but at the end of the day there were some differences. We're at the beginning of a new era in the high-end, and it will surely force very competitive prices for the rest of the processors.
