AMD Tops Intel With Its 32-core Threadripper 2, Which Will Ship This Year

Yes, it will probably run Crysis 3.

- Mark Hachman

A MD just did Intel one better at Computex. On the Tuesday of the show, Intel wowed the Taipei crowds with a 28-core Core chip (see page 11), which the company promised by the end of the year. One day after, on Wednesday, AMD announced Thread ripper 2—and at 32 cores and 64 threads, it will easily top what Intel promised.

AMD’s Thread ripper 2 announcement was the highlight of the company’s press conference, which didn’t have much to offer in the way of new announcements in graphics. AMD did say that Power Color's tiny Vega 56 Nano for mini-ITX systems is now shipping. The company also showed off a 7nm derivative of its Radeon Vega GPU for workstations, advising users to “stay tuned” for 7nm consumer GPUs. Finally, the company showed off a 7nm version of its Epyc server processor, which will ship next year.

Over 400 million PC and console players use AMD’s Radeon technology; over ten times as many use Vega GPUs, said Lisa Su, the president and chief executive of AMD, comparing to the company’s previous-generation GPUs. Epyc, the company’s server processor, has captured 50 server platforms. Su highlighted design wins by Cisco, HP, and Tencent.

“We are in an incredible time in our market,” said Su. “Computing is absolutely everywhere.”

THREADRIPPER 2

“This is a heavy metal performance,” said Jim Anderson, AMD’s corporate vice president of the Computing and Graphics Business Group, summing up the performance of AMD’s Thread ripper 2, a year to the day after Anderson announced the first-generation Thread ripper at Computex 2017.