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AMD’s Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 processors have already punched holes in Intel’s product lines. The Ryzen 5 1600X is a six-core / 12-thread CPU at $250, compared with over $400 for its Intel counterpart, and the eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 1800X ($500) compares well with Intel’s Core i7-6900K at $1,100. AMD’s financial analyst day yesterday wasn’t just a discussion of data center and deep learning workloads — enthusiasts got some serious love as well.
Now, AMD is prepping a new, workstation-class CPU to take Intel on at the top of its market. Ryzen Threadripper will debut on an all-new motherboard platform with support for up to 16 cores, 32 threads, four memory channels, and (we suspect) a price point that’ll give Intel heartburn once again. In fact, some of the rumors we’ve heard about Skylake-X, such as Intel’s rumored 12-core Core i9, make sense if evaluated against Threadripper and AMD’s competitive positioning at this price point.
With that said, AMD is probably going to play with luxury pricing a bit more this time around. Desktop users who need 32 threads of CPU performance are few and far between, and the workstation users who can make use of a chip like this are more likely to have deep pockets. This also isn’t going to be a gaming play — or at least, not primarily a gaming play. Rumors also suggest a 3.1GHz base clock and 3.6GHz boost with a 150W TDP. That’s pretty reasonable for a 16-core chip, and while we’re not confirming that clock speed, anything from 2.8GHz – 3.2GHz base clock would be reasonable. AMD’s SenseMI technology may give the company more freedom to turbo boost the core depending on how many threads are in any given workload.
The days of paying $1,800 for a ten-core CPU are numbered. Beyond that, we’ll have to wait and see how everything lands, and what the capabilities of this new high-end enthusiast platform are. Chips like the Threadripper are important primarily as halo products — they may not sell in large quantities, but they demonstrate the capabilities of the platform and set consumer expectations for what lower-end hardware can provide.
From that perspective, AMD’s decision to make a play for the highest end of the market is noteworthy for what it reveals about the company’s self-perception. When AMD revived the FX brand for its Bulldozer processors, its marketing department was writing checks that the engineers couldn’t cash. Now, AMD is aggressively taking a leadership position in defining what kind of CPU performance consumers will be able to buy at a given price point. Intel will answer that challenge — if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that Intel won’t sit back and risk AMD impinging on its data center and enthusiast gaming markets without a fight. But at least for now, AMD is enthusiastically taking the lead.
