After kicking off 2017 with Ryzen, AMD got all the attention it needed. The company outperformed its long-time rival Intel and laid the foundation for affordable high-end computing, making the most of its extremely impressive Zen Architecture.
Since then, the entire CPU market has been disrupted. AMD’s been on the rise, but their success did raise some alarms on the other side. Team Intel has raised the bar beyond mainstream platforms with their Core-X series which features all the way up to 18 cores on Skylake-X processors. Though the higher-clocked variant is still unreleased, their X299 platform is available to pre-order on multiple retail sites.
Ryzen Threadripper To Launch In August
But, that doesn’t mean team red has no plan to turn it up a notch. The company is going to release their first HEDT (High-End) Desktop platform known as X399. According to Kitguru, the redesigned X399 platform will be beefier than X370 – AMD’s top mainstream platform – and will be showcased with new Ryzen Threadripper processors early in August. These Threadripper processors are said to boast a major upgrade over mainstream chips with up to 16 cores.
Rumour has it AMD had scheduled a late-July launch for the Threadripper, but then, it had to be postponed to the next month. Now, we expect to see the new platform and chips on or around August 10, a move which would again square things up between AMD and Intel.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper boasts a strong package with up to 16 cores and 32 threads. Earlier, it was reported that the entry-level 16-core variant of this chip would be starting at $850 in the US with higher variants costing even more. Since then, we haven’t heard about pricing, but Dell has already confirmed its all-new Alienware Area-51 desktop PC will deploy 12 and 16 core variants of the Threadripper. The two models of Area-51 will deploy Ryzen Threadripper 19** (X) series and will be very competitive in terms of price and performance.
Meanwhile, the heavily anticipated X399 platform will take things up to the next level. The latest platform is said to offer up to 64 PCIe lanes of which 60 will be utilizable by discrete graphics. It will feature Socket TR4 that has 4094 pins and is the largest HEDT socket shipping to date. This socket will be surrounded by a quad channel DIMM interface, which will support extreme memory capacities.
Long story short, AMD’s Summer launch will surely make a big impact in the HEDT segment, taking the battle straight against Intel’s 12 core Core-X chips. The 18-core variant would arrive sometime in October, but still, it would be a neck and neck face-off between the two computing giants.
Stay tuned for more for more updates on Ryzen Threadripper and its plausible release.