If this morning we were talking about how Intel used an event like the Computex 2018 to get ahead of other rivals in the market with a new processor, of which they really little confirmed, except that it had been endowed with 28 cores, capacity to execute 56 threads at a base speed of 5 Ghz, something that literally left us with our mouths open, we did not have to wait too long to know the answer that AMD, and what a response.
Precisely in the entry that we dedicated to Intel we talked about the response that AMD was predictably going to give Intel in not long time and especially in a data that we did not know, such as the fact that, in its highest range, Intel sold its processors at a price of about $ 1.999 while AMD did the same at $ 999. In this new generation something very similar will surely happen, especially if we take into account that, just one day later, AMD has put all the meat on the spit.
AMD surprises us with the second generation of Threadripper, a range of processors with up to 32 process cores and 64 threads of execution
Entering fully to talk about the future in the processors that AMD brings us, tell you that the new generation Threadripper, which will foreseeably hit the market in the autumn of this year, curiously months before Intel also launches its new high-end processors, it will do so together with an architecture that will have nothing less than 32 process cores and 64 threads that will run at 3 GhzWithout a doubt, a declaration of intent from AMD, a company that, after many years, will not let Intel go back to being what it was not too long ago.
As AMD itself has announced, apparently and in order to introduce such a number of cores in a single processor, its engineers have had to make use of the new Zepplein dies with 12 nanometer lithographic processes. As a detail, tell you that these dies have eight cores each, in this way the first Threadripper made use of two of these dies to offer that maximum of 16 cores. This second generation of the range of processors will finally have four dies, enough to equip them with up to 32 cores.
Despite the raw power it offers, the Threadripper range also has its drawbacks
The negative part of this new generation of AMD processors is found in the energy consumption they have. To make the idea very clear to us, tell you that, if the TDP of the first generation of this range of chips already exceeded 180 W, in this second generation their energy needs goes up to a not inconsiderable 250 W, something that we must take into account, especially if for professional reasons we are interested in installing a processor with these technical characteristics on our servers, which will be used for the most part.
Another major limitation is that the X399 chipset only supports up to four memory channels for the eight needed now. Due to this the two new channels that are activated now do not have direct access to memory, something that will increase your latency although, according to AMD, this does not mean that it affects performance. Precisely by doubling the number of cores and lowering the size only 2 nanometers these processors offer a lower frequency, at least for the moment, of 3 Ghz base and 0 Ghz in Turbo mode, at this point, we must attend to AMD as they indicate that in the final versions this operating frequency could be higher. As for the cache memory, it is expected that in the 3-core version this will increase to 4 MB.