AMD CEO, Dr Lisa Su, kicked off the annual AMD Computex press conference with the stat that more than five million Ryzen shipments have been made in just over a year since launch in March last year. That's good going.
Radeon RX Vega for the foreseeable future
As expected, there were no hard-and-fast updates for Radeon GPUs, meaning that the current Vega architectuere will headline consumer graphics for the remainder of 2018. That said, there was official mention of a Radeon RX Vega 56 Nano card manufactured in conjunction with PowerColor.
Looking towards the future, AMD showcased the incumbent Vega architecture running on 7nm silicon. No frequencies or other salient details were provided, but expect a small speed hike and reduced power consumption.
It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that next-generation Navi is still a ways off from consumer debut. Reading between the lines, we shouldn't expect it to see it for at least a year. This is likely the reason why rival Nvidia has been dragging its heels for its own next-generation consumer Volta architecture.
Ryzen Threadripper set to be bigger, faster
On to the meat of the conference, detailing soon-to-be-available products, Jim Anderson, head of the computing and graphics group, announced that AMD is releasing second-generation Ryzen Threadripper CPUs.
The present 1950X tops out at 16 cores and 32 threads that run at a peak 4GHz. Intel has just announced a 28-core jobbie destined for release later this year. Trumping both is the second-generation Ryzen Threadripper. Based on the 12nm Zen+ architecture and enhanced Precision Boost feature present on the new Ryzens, the standout feature is provision for 32 cores and 64 threads.
Encompassing four Ryzen dies connected via Infinity Fabric, it's pretty much a top-spec Epyc in consumer form. AMD showed the 32-core Threadripper finishing the Blender rather quickly, and you can expect it to be close to twice as fast as first-gen models, depending upon peak speed.
Getting to this size means upping the TDP from 180W to 250W, most likely. Still running on the X399 platform, expect to see revised motherboards from the select few manufacturers that explicitly support the supposed higher power draw.
In related news, Lisa Su mentioned that AMD has socket-compatible 7nm 'Zen 2' Epyc silicon in the labs and it's working 'really nicely'. Interesting times.
Presentation starts at 14m 15s
