AMD had its time in the limelight yesterday at the Computex tradeshow in Taiwan, as it announced it's biggest product launches for the rest of 2017 and beyond. This summer will see the launch of Threadripper - the company's high-end desktop (HEDT) processor and platform that will offer up to 16 cores.
The highly anticipated Vega GPU architecture will arrive soon too, with AMD CEO Lisa Su stating the end of July is the target for the launch of its next generation consumer graphics cards that will finally enter the battle at the high-end with Nvidia in the PC gaming hardware market.
Going back to Threadripper, more details were revealed at AMD's event about the processors and the company revealed an actual product for the first time. It's a huge processor that appears to be the same size as its EPYC range of server products that were revealed a few weeks ago. However, Intel is likely watching the Threadripper story unfold with some trepidation given the specifications that were revealed yesterday.
We already know that Threadripper will have up to 16 cores and indications are that there will be nine processors starting at 10 cores plus 12-core and 14-core models too. Yesterday, though, revealed that every Threadripper processor will offer 64 PCI-E lanes of bandwidth. If you're not familiar with this term, every PC system has a limited amount of bandwidth that allows data to pass from component to component. For modern components such as the latest SSDs and graphics cards, the amount of bandwidth is decided by the number of PCI-E lanes.
It's the same for Intel systems too and one of the benefits of opting for Intel's high-end desktop platform - currently X99, is that you get more bandwidth - enough to offer two graphics cards the maximum 16 lanes of bandwidth (32 lanes in total) in an SLI or CrossFire multi-GPU setup, as well as some left over for other PCI-E devices such as SSDs.
However, Intel's X99 platform only offers 40 lanes in total, and the cheapest CPU on the platform, the Core i7-6800K, only offers 28 lanes - Threadripper will offer a massive 64 PCI-E lanes with every CPU, and Lisa Su showed demos in the event of three Vega graphics cards running in a single system with the full 16 PCI-E lanes each.
This is significant for a high-end desktop platform as it not only means that AMD has more bandwidth than Intel, but this area is awash with high-end gamers and workstation users that do actually make use of more than one graphics card. In addition, it's likely that AMD will undercut Intel in the price per core stakes too, just as it did with the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 series.
Intel's current flagship desktop CPU - the Core i7-6950X costs 50% more than Intel's next 10-core... [+]
That said, Intel is actually cutting prices with its next generation Skylake-X CPUs. For example, the 10-core Core i9-7900X should cost $999 while the current 10-core, the Core i7-6950X costs $1400, albeit with a much larger amount of cache.
However, while the amount of PCI-E lanes is extremely interesting, we still don't know the most important fact about Threadripper - its price. This has been the strongest part of the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 series and even in areas that AMD wasn't faster than Intel, in sheer value terms it was still better in many areas, especially in rendering and content creation.
At the very least, though, I can now update the table with the new PCI-E lane details so this summer's CPU launches now look something like this:
Summer 2017 high-end desktop CPU specifications and prices from AMD and Intel
Meanwhile, the last 24 hours has seen the first images of Threadripper motherboards too, with a massive processor socket dominating the PCB. The one below is courtesy of Asus and is called the Zenith Extreme.
Asus has revealed its flagship motherboard for AMD's new Threadripper CPUs revealing a massive CPU... [+]
The same motherboard has been involved in some discussion about possible overclocking headroom with Threadripper too, as an image surfaced of the motherboard having a CPU frequency readout on a display of just over 5GHz. This is likely due to an extreme overclocking session using liquid nitrogen, but there is hope that Threadripper might be able to overclock a little further than Ryzen on AM4 motherboards, which has been limited to around 4-4.2GHz.
I'll be back with more AMD and Intel news so feel free to comment here on Forbes or follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
