Back to all articles AMD Scores in the Core-wars with Its 32-Core Monster Published:
The Ghz race is is long behind us, but AMD kicked off the core-wars by offering mainstream users more than just quad-core CPUs. Now it seems the sky's the limit as Big Red keeps cramming more cores into it’s consumer line. The latest attack comes in the form of this 32-core Threadripper 2 CPU.
It’s been a long time since CPUs have had a clear marketing number to appeal to mainstream consumers. Until the Core architecture took over from the ill-conceived Pentium 4 CPUs back in the day, the bigger the clocks the better the performance. Or so Joe Average believed.
With AMD losing their touch around the time Phenom came out, there hasn’t really been anything to latch onto with each new generation. What’s the difference between an i5 4600 and 8600 CPU? Sure those of us who are into PC technology will look at benchmark scores and real world performance, but that’s not most people. So now it seems the idea is to boast about who has the most cores at each price point. That’s generally a good thing and hopefully will encourage mainstream applications like games and web browsers to become more multithreaded.
King of the Hill
For now, it seems that AMD is winning the core-wars with the new flagship ThreadRipper CPU. We don’t know what the product name will be for this 2nd-generation Threadripper part, but we do know a bit about what’s going on under the hood.
There are actually two chips showed off by AMD. Both chips are rated for 250W TDPs. Both are also clicked at 3Ghz, with a 3.4Ghz boost. The big difference is that one model has 24 cores and the other 32. The core speeds are considerably lower than previous CPUs in the ThreadRipper line, so it’s unlikely to perform as well on software with low thread counts. The chips all have two threads per core, which makes them formidable parts when it comes to workloads such as data processing and video conversion.
While AMD showed these CPUs off using nothing but air cooling, only time will tell if overclocking is possible in any meaningful way. We know that these cores can handle much higher clock speeds, since we’ve seen it in other CPUs. However, with this many cores running at, for example, 4Ghz the problem of dealing with the heat is significant. On top of that, it only takes one core out of the 32 that can’t handle the higher clocks and the whole package will be unstable. It will be interesting to see, especially since these CPUs are made using a 12nm fabrication process.
We can’t wait to get our hands on one of these and seeing what sort of workstation builds are possible!
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