This is absolutely insane.
It's official: AMD's Threadripper will bring a 16-core, 32-thread monster to the desktop
Threadripper will ship this summer on consumer PCs, and Intel should be worried.
By Gordon Mah Ung
Executive Editor, PCWorld | MAY 16, 2017 4:10 PM PT
It's called Threadripper, and it will be the first consumer-focused chip with 16 cores and 32 threads of computing power. Yes, you read that right: 16 cores and 32 threads of computing power, confirming that the CPU wars will rage on at the high end.
AMD's Jim Anderson announced the high-end desktop chip during the company's financial analyst day Tuesday. Details were sparse, but the CPU has been making the rumor mills the last few weeks, though the company was expecting to announce at the upcoming Computex show.
But AMD couldn't wait. One reason may be heavy and hot rumors that Intel is preparing to release a Core i9 CPU at Computex. If the rumors are true, Intel's top-end Core i9 will feature 12 cores and Hyper-Threading, and will be paired with a new X299 chipset. The CPUs themselves would apparently be based on 6th-generation Skylake cores.
Why this matters: Grab your popcorn, because after years of Intel domination, the CPU wars are on—and that's great news for PC enthusiasts. If previous Ryzen chip performance is a predictor of how Threadripper will do, the 32-thread chip should easily surpass Intel's current 10-core Core i7-6950X in heavily multi-threaded and heavy multi-tasking chores. "Ryzen Threadripper is targeted at the absolute ultra high-end of performance in desktop," Anderson said.
So how far can AMD and Intel go pushing thread-count as a feature? Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights said the sky is the limit.
Read more at PCWorld...