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AMD may have ironed out gaming problems with its second iteration of Ryzen CPUs, just in time to offer competition to Intel’s upcoming chips.
AMD is rumored to be working on more Ryzen CPUs that add even more cores and threads to the equation. Their release is said to be several months away, so it may not be long before AMD reveals a 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen CPU with support for quad-channel DDR4 memory.
Although AMD’s Ryzen CPUs have received some criticism for their single-core performance and gaming ability, they have excelled in applications and settings where the full power of their many cores and threads can be utilized. The rumored CPUs that AMD may have in the works would up the ante even more, making them even more capable than the competition in those settings.
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The main source for this latest AMD rumor is French PC magazine Canard PC Hardware, which said the chip would have 16 cores and 32 threads, be a high-end desktop (rather than server) processor, and support AMD’s rumored X399 chipset, as well as four channel DDR4 memory.
Its socket is reported to be LGA SP3r2, have a TDP of 150w, and clock in at 2.4GHz base frequency, boosting to 2.8GHz. That is a rather low frequency for most consumer-grade hardware, but such a chip would not be designed with gaming or typically low-core/thread count tasks in mind. It would instead excel at multiple threaded tasks, such as video editing and rendering.
Backing up PC Canard’s original Tweet, Chinese site Chiphell (via Digiworthy) has its own sources to cite. They claim that AMD will reveal the rumored CPUs in a couple of months and confirm that the flagship version will be a 16 core, 32 thread monster. The reported purpose of this lineup is to bridge the gap between AMD’s top-of-the-line consumer hardware and its more performance-focused server platform.
The Chinese sources also claim the problems that led to somewhat erratic gaming performance with Ryzen CPUs have been ironed out, suggesting that, with overclocking, these rumored Ryzen CPUs could also be excellent at gaming.
Pricing for the flagship chip is expected to be around the $1,000 mark.
The potential release date of AMD’s new chips, sometime within the next four to six months, would put them in position to compete with Intel’s expected Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X chips, which are slated for an August 2017 release.