Computex 18 has provided us the technology that will define how our lives are going to shape in coming future, the conference held in Taipei, Taiwan concluded today with so much to cover and look for in coming days. Our focus for today is the AMD’s presentation that has already been the headlines due to their claim of supporting more than 40 percent of console and PC gaming and their partnerships with the laptop manufacturers.
AMD and Intel are the world’s biggest silicon manufacturers, and both are focusing on the numbers during the conference, Intel revealed their unfinished 28-Core CPU on Tuesday, five hours later AMD came up with the second generation of their Threadripper that utilized the inactive dies present in the first generation.
AMD has been enjoying their rise in the silicon market since the reveal of the Ryzen in 2017, and the Threadripper that had 16 cores and 32 threads meaning a total of 32 logical cores that was for the gamers and 3d rendering purposes. The Threadripper had three variants depending upon physical core count. It had a four-die design; the dies were connected by the AMD infinity fabric, two of them were inactive at the time.
Jim Anderson, AMD’s vice president of the Computing and Graphics business group, talked to PCWorld and said, “We had 8-Core, 12-Core and 16-Core variants of the Threadripper but the 16-Core variant had the most market share”.
At Computex 2018 AMD revealed the iteration of the Thredripper, Threadripper 2 or Threadripper 2000, based on the 12nm Zen+ architecture same as we saw in the 2nd generation of the Ryzen APUs two months ago. It has many variants like the first generation with the high-end variant cracking 32 cores and 64 threads which means it is the first CPU to have 32 physical cores. The processor has more or less same design as its predecessor, but this time around all of the four silicon dies are active, each of them house eight cores with the total of 32 processors.
All of them are overclockable up to 3.4Ghz with stock speeds of 3.0Ghz, the amount and speed of Cache is not announced, but for the high-end model the cache may end up being 64MB. The processor will have 60+4 PCIe lanes and four memory channels. The details and comparisons of different generations and versions of Threadrippers are given below:
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Interestingly AMD has gone for the same four-channel memory although the four dies can potentially support eight-channel memory, as there are now four dies and a die can support dual channel memory. The dies are connected via improved AMD infinity fiber there were some questions about the memory latency last year as the only connection of the dies is the fiber.
But the performance of the Threadripper resolved all those queries, especially the infinity fiber, was designed in such a way that it can handle the memory speeds very easily.
The four channel memory design of the processor is such that, the first and the last die are connected to the memory, while the middle dies only get the memory that comes through them. It has its advantages and disadvantages in the form of lesser memory allocated and improved efficiency.
The new processor has 250-watt TDP and is compatible with the X399 motherboards, but the motherboard manufacturers have some concerns as their motherboard may not be able to supply ample power to the processor making the overclocking capabilities slightly impossible, although new better versions X399 motherboards don’t have this issue.
Now, this 32-core processor is for the consumers who want “air-cooled performance” in their rigs, unlike some other firms who need Liquid nitrogen to cool their 28-Core devices. The functionality of the device revolves around gaming, servers and 3d rendering purposes. The price and availability of the processor have not revealed yet, but AMD promises the first product will be released during Q3 of 2018.
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