Intel's 28-core CPU monster vs. AMD's 32-core 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper
Core blimey
The battle for 'how many cores can you possibly fit onto a CPU' has been getting rather toasty at this year's Computex show, as last night Intel and AMD both unveiled (or teased, in Intel's case) some monstrously powerful CPUs in the form of 28-core and, wait for it, 32-core chipsets.
Intel were first to the mark when it flashed a cheeky glance at their brand-new 28-core prototype system running at a whopping 5.0GHz. What's more, they said it will arriving this year, toward the end of this fair year of 2018.
That was all Intel were willing to say on the subject during the actual press conference, but more details have been trickling in after a limited number of press got to see it in action. Anandtech were one such publication, and we now know this 28-core beast runs on the LGA3647 socket - putting it in the same bracket as Intel's Xeon enterprise chips - and has a total of 3647 pins.
Given the sheer size of the thing, this is very much a CPU that's destined for servers and enterprise machines only, so don't expect to see it in any consumer-based systems any time soon. Indeed, when most of Intel's top-end Xeon chips will set you back more than $10,000+, this new 28-core model will likely require a fair few buckets of cash before anyone will be able to get their hands on it.
Intel's glory was short-lived, however, as just a few hours later AMD unveiled their brand-new 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper CPU, boasting an astonishing 32-cores and 64 threads - that's double the number of cores and threads you'll find on AMD's 1st Gen Threadripper, the 1950X.
Even better, AMD's 2nd Gen Threadrippers will be out even earlier than Intel's chip, with their current release window slated for sometime in early August, and - much like the 1st generation of Threadrippers - are very much intended for consumer (all right, workstation) use.
Utilizing the same 12nm Zen+ architecture as the rest of AMD's 2nd Gen Ryzen family of CPUs, such as the Ryzen 7 2700 / 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600 / 2600X, Threadripper 2 is essentially four 8-core Ryzen APUs stuck together, ushering in new and improved boost speeds and faster caches. It's been designed to fit in the same X399 motherboards used by 1st Gen Threadrippers, too, although with a TDP of 250W, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a new wave of X399 motherboards closer to the time of launch - much like what AMD did with their X470 boards for their 2nd Gen Ryzen 5 and 7 chips.
That's all we know for the time being, but gosh, it's all quite exciting, isn't it? Certainly much better than yesterday's disappointing news about Nvidia's Turing graphics cards being much further off than we thought. Again, it's anyone's guess how much Threadripper 2 will cost once it lands in a couple of months time, but at least we don't have to wait very long to find out.