The surprise announcement came at the Computex trade show in Taiwan and means that AMD is doubling its core count of the current fastest Threadripper, the 1950X, which has 16 cores and 32 threads.
AMD has stated that the new CPUs will be compatible with current X399 motherboards so you won't have to invest in a new motherboard. However, with what must be a sizeable increase in power consumption, it's likely that we'll see new motherboards that are designed to cater more effectively for the new CPUs and maybe add more features, just as we did with 2nd Generation Ryzen.
The original Threadripper CPUs had two dummy dies under the heat spreader so there was certainly enough room for this many cores. Besides, Threadripper CPUs are essentially EPYC server CPUs, so it was a relatively easy move for AMD to make in terms of shifting to 32 cores.
The new Threadripper CPUs will launch in Q3 this year and will go head-to-head with Intel's high-end desktop processors, including the yet unnamed 28-core beast I wrote about yesterday. Unlike 2017, though, Intel appears to have lost the core war, with AMD looking set to have a four-core advantage.
The exciting part will be benchmarking the two CPUs to see just how fast they are. Intel appears to have a big advantage in frequency, with its 28-core model reaching 5GHz across all cores in a demo held at the announcement. If this is possible without extreme cooling, then there's a chance it could make up the four-core deficit. Of course, AMD will also be including the improved boosting algorithms and lower latencies we saw with 2nd Generation Ryzen plus if the original Threadripper CPUs are anything to by, its 32-core model could well end up being cheaper than Intel's 28-core CPU too.
You might also want to read my previous story on Threadripper: AMD Ryzen Threadripper: The Fascinating Story Behind The Processor That Beat Intel
