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AMD Hardware Technology

AMD Is Working On a Monster 64-Core Threadripper CPU, Landing As Early As Q4 2019 (wccftech.com) 206

Posted by BeauHD from the cores-race dept.
AMD is preparing a monstrous 64-core/128-thread Threadripper CPU for launch in Q4 2019. "AMD's largest HEDT processor right now is the W2990X which tops out at 32-cores," reports Wccftech. "This is nothing to sneeze at and is already the highest core HEDT part around but because the world can't get enough of these yummy cores, AMD is planning to launch a 64-core version in Q4 2019." From the report: The platform is called X599 right now although I am told AMD is considering changing the name to avoid confusion with Intel. This is not really surprising since both Intel and AMD HEDT platforms have the same nomenclature and it can get really confusing. I am also told that they they plan to retain the "99" suffix. AMD is planning to launch the 64-core Threadripper part and the corresponding platform in Q4 2019. In fact, that is when you can expect these motherboards to start popping up from various AIBs.

Now my source did not mention a new socket, so as far as I know, this should be socket compatible with the existing TR4 motherboards and only a bios update should be needed if you already own one. What I don't know right now is whether this is a 14nm part or a 7nm part. Conventional wisdom would dictate that this is a 14nm part trickling down from their server space, but who knows, maybe the company will surprise all of us? This is pretty exciting news, because knowing AMD, the 64-core Threadripper CPU will probably be priced in the $2500 to $3000 range, making it one of the most affordable workstation processors around with this many threads.
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AMD Is Working On a Monster 64-Core Threadripper CPU, Landing As Early As Q4 2019 More

AMD Is Working On a Monster 64-Core Threadripper CPU, Landing As Early As Q4 2019

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  • Take my money! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    My Christmas present is all lined up! Please notice I said 'Christmas' not 'Holiday'...

    • That'll be a $4,000 Christmas present, like a nice camera. I'm in, I think. On the other hand, 32 cores with higher boost clock... decisions, decisions. What is not in doubt is that my next workstation will be a Threadripper. Enough with these mere desktop class chips. Four memory channels for the win.

    • Re:Take my money! (Score:5, Funny)

      by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Friday June 14, 2019 @12:14AM (#58759424)

      At last... a CPU that will deliver a computing solution capable of keeping up with me when I play Solitaire!

      Brilliant!

    • Please notice I said 'Christmas' not 'Holiday'...

      Fuck off troll. Please notice I said fuck off. No need for you to reply.

  • I want htop screenshots! (Score:5, Funny)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @09:23PM (#58758954) Homepage

    64 cores?

    I want htop screenshots!

    Not to verify the performance, not to dispute the number of cores. Just... some guys like to have pictures of Ferraris and Grand Nationals on their desktops.

    • Re:I want htop screenshots! (Score:5, Funny)

      by kriston ( 7886 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @11:03PM (#58759266) Homepage Journal

      This is going to force all those 80-column window holdouts to finally get with the times.

    • We have a 50k+ core supercomputer where I work, but I don't know if htop runs on such a thing...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pz ( 113803 )

      See, THIS is why I read Slashdot -- to get tips on which tools are useful. I've learned a ton of things over the years through random throw-away comments from posters who didn't even realize the gems they were laying down. htop! Cool -- I'd never heard of it, but, now that it's installed, I see its value.

      Personally, for a geek-cool screenshot, I would prefer the view from xosview +cpus. With 64 cores, yep, that would be sweet!

    • There's a screenshot of a 64 core machine on the htop website [hisham.hm]. It's the one with the white background.

  • Full-blown and blueprinted (Score:5, Funny)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @09:24PM (#58758964) Journal

    I'm holding out for the 350-thread supercharged Pantyripper with the dual-overhead cams.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      I'd give you the funny mod if I ever had a mod point to give.

      I'm taking your actual point to be "Who needs it?"

      My feelings are actually kind of mixed. On the one hand, I like to feel like I have a muscle machine, and there was a time when I needed it.

      On the other hand, the hardware has gone so far that I just don't need that much anymore. Actually, my smartphone has plenty of power for my everyday applications and almost all of my waiting time is caused by the network, not because I'm CPU bound.

      On the third

      • side note, you get nerd points if you use on the gripping hand [amazon.com] in place of "third".

      • I'm taking your actual point to be "Who needs it?"

        I'm a big believer in "power for power's sake".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lgw ( 121541 )

        I'm taking your actual point to be "Who needs it?"

        My home workstation is a 32-core 2-socket Xeon box. I use it to transcode Bluray into high-quality rips. That gets me transcoding in somewhat better than runtime, so there's lots of room for meaningful improvement.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          Once the rendering quality exceeds your limited human perceptual capacity, why would you need moor?

          Easiest to take the example of digital cameras (since you've gone into that application area). I may be a bit off on the exact numbers, but I think a pre-digital color photograph corresponded to less than 4 million pixels with a color depth less than 24 bits. The exact numbers may be a little different, and of course you can escalate and ask "But what about 8 by 10s?" or "But there's no limit to closeups?", bu

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by lgw ( 121541 )

            Once the rendering quality exceeds your limited human perceptual capacity, why would you need moor?

            You don't. But Bluray looks better than DVD, and is much more compute-intensive to rip. I can't see a difference between Bluray and 4K, even up close to a big 4K TV, so I don't bother with 4k (not to mention transcoding time would be nuts). Of course, I've only seen streamed 4k content, which might be all crap.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by shanen ( 462549 )

            I hate typos.

            s/moor/more/
            s/can saw/saw/

        • What's your baseline encoding preferences? Any plans to redo your library once AV1 gets a reasonable level of support? I'm curious what kind of encoding times you get with AV1 on such a beefy system.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by lgw ( 121541 )

            Currently everything is h.264. I use Handbrake, with it's "constant quality" setting, at 21 for Bluray and 19 for DVD. I picked those by doing some test scenes, then going frame-by-frame flipping back and forth with the original looking for any pixel-level differences (this won't catch something subtle like a 1-bit color difference, but anything more than that jumps out at you). I found the settings that I couldn't see any difference, the set the quality 1 higher.

            Unlike some people who do this, I don't k

      • For most people, that many threads is overkill. However if you use a computer for creating instead of consuming then there is really no such thing as too much performance assuming the hardware can pay for itself.

        Resource requirements also expand as hardware expands. There is no reason any application in MS Office today should use appreciably more resources to do the same task as previous versions. But they do. As one arrogant dev said to me, "my time is worth more than your ram." Clearly he doesn't keep up

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          Substantive reply. Reminds me of how expenses rise to meet income. I'm having a bit of trouble interpreting exactly what you mean by "pay for itself" in terms of justifying more CPU capacity.

          Maybe I should try to reword it in traditional economic terms? Essentially I'm saying that demand for computing power is inelastic, rather like food. There's a limit to how much food you can eat and there's a limit to how much computing power any person can consume. (However I do reject most of economics in favor of ekr

      • If you are secretly an avatar of Shiva, I think you just blew your cover.

    • Re:Full-blown and blueprinted (Score:5, Funny)

      by baker_tony ( 621742 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @10:05PM (#58759118) Homepage

      I'm waiting for 640 core version. 640 cores will be enough for anyone.

      • Annnnnd... GPUs passed 64 cores long ago. Radeon VII has 3840 I believe.

        • ahem, passed 640 cores.

        • Re:Full-blown and blueprinted (Score:5, Informative)

          by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Friday June 14, 2019 @05:12AM (#58759994)
          GPU usage of "core" is bullshit. In the case of Radeon VII I believe the "3840 cores" is actually 60 real cores, each real core being able to handle 64 "threads" at a time. These bundles of 64 "threads" is called a "wave" and are essentially very wide SIMD units with some "branching" logic (the 64 "threads" can be split up into two different instruction streams, one stream executed on odd clocks the other executed on even clocks)

        • GPU "cores" aren't cores in the traditional sense. They are glorified FPUs.

          • Wrong, GPU cores are cores. Over time, they are travelling the same trajectory as CPU cores, that is, more superscaler, more shadow regisisters, more branch optimization, etc. Check out the scalar component of GCN, even more like a typical CPU core that previously, as opposed to the vector component, which is rather like AVX. I believe, scalar cores are doubled in RDNA.

          • Really? Did AMD and Intel get rid of FPUs in the core architecture, and offload them all to the GPU?

    • I'm holding out for the 350-thread supercharged Pantyripper

      metoo!

  • We'll look back at this one day (Score:5, Funny)

    by SmaryJerry ( 2759091 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @09:32PM (#58758992)
    One day we will look back and remember these days..... "Remember when CPUs had less than 100,000 cores? We were so primitive then."

    • Re:We'll look back at this one day (Score:5, Funny)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @10:34PM (#58759186) Journal
      I look at it now and think, "Why not just get a GPU?"

    • Remember when CPU power was all about MHz and later even GHz and not about cores? Because they all had just ONE?

    • "Remember when we had CPUs?"

  • why did apple not use this for the mac pro? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @09:36PM (#58759010)

    why did apple not use this for the mac pro? they have AMD video cards why not also use there cpus?

    • why did apple not use this for the mac pro?

      Dunno, but it's gonna make the mac pro CPU look like a cow turd. A fresh one, that you can't even burn for fuel.

      • Dunno, but it's gonna make the mac pro CPU look like a cow turd. A fresh one, that you can't even burn for fuel.

        You were setting fire to it wrong.

        • You were setting fire to it wrong.

          Sand Won't Save You This Time [sciencemag.org]

          It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water—with which it reacts explosively.

    • why did apple not use this for the mac pro? they have AMD video cards why not also use there cpus?

      That is pretty interesting, I think for the Mac Pro maybe Intel did have the best high end option to be found there...

      I find it more mysterious why they don't use AMD chips in the laptops, I've always thought that would be a nice mix in recent years with really good AMD chips. But maybe the roadmap to move to ARM is so close it makes no sense to make that change at this point or in recent history.

      Could also jus

      • Actually, a better question would be - why didn't AMD use their A10s in the Mac Pro? Compatible w/ the iOS devices, comes from the same supply as iPhones and iPads, has the power savings that they might want, and AMD would also have greater control on the supply chain, given that it's used for iPhones as well.

    • They were pondering it, but the socket costed 999,--

    • The answer to your question is in the phrase "is working on".

      There's no way you could have a machine on sale by the fall based on a processor that doesn't have engineering samples available now. Note that that supposed source that the article cites actually claims a January 2020 release, not the Q4 2019 which the article writer then claims.

    • Logistics and practicality . If AMD isn’t releasing this until Q4 2019, that means Apple may not have it yet to test it. That’s also not withstanding the fact that Apple doesn’t have any AMD motherboards to test the entire platform and not just the chip.

    • why did apple not use this for the mac pro? they have AMD video cards why not also use there cpus?

      Same thing that hold the iPhone back in many cases from using the latest and greatest. When they went to x86 from PowerPC, they were asked the same thing and they simply stated they went with Intel because they had expectations of selling models in the millions of units, and Intel could promise those production numbers and AMD couldn't. They're a small part of the market, but only have a relatively small number of models of computers. Since they don't want models to sit on their store marked as "Out of Stoc

    • Apple don't like AMD. They hate NVIDIA. There's a difference.

    • why did apple not use this for the mac pro? they have AMD video cards why not also use there cpus?

      Prices are not close to similar for mass manufacturers when compared to consumer or small-scale manufacturers. Intel likely gave Apple an offer they couldn't refuse and locked it in with a contract.

  • Did it lurch from the ocean and stomp a city?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Wccftech (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ChoGGi ( 522069 ) <slashdot@ch[ ]i.org ['ogg' in gap]> on Thursday June 13, 2019 @11:06PM (#58759274) Homepage

    next...

  • It's got to be 7nm to fit within power budget and still keep reasonable single thread performance. Plus that's conventional for intel. AMD's TR cores have lined up with with the ryzen cores with the first number of the model name have matched. .

    • Correct. If this comes in under 200W they'll fly off the shelves. I believe the boards expect up to 250W parts, so they might slip that high.

  • My AND 64 number plate is finally relevant again, a mere 13 years after AMD dumped the '64' from their CPUs.
  • Learned about them about a year ago, seems one of the big selling points is the JVM magically breaks streams such that all cores get used. To be honest, I didn't see how based on my applications (take a big file, do this, then that, something else, Unix pipes essentially, get results). For me, the results of Parse.line(n-1) directly influences Parse.line(n) means I don't see how 2 cores help.

    But if they can take my huge file and magically parallel process it then we have a, really, do I have to say it

  • 64 cores with abundant PCIe lanes? I don't even care how much it costs. But do make sure it works in the exsiting STR4 boards.

  • And it still has that really neat "Threadripper" name! Intel better put its thinking cap on and come up with the MasterBlaster 9000 128 core pretty soon!
  • The bottle of cider that I bought in Tesco for £2.05 had 64 cores in it too. It all depends on what the cores can actually do. Thankfully my bottle of cider can do the required task. TFI Friday.

  • Is Epyc Rome going to be 14nm?

    I figured this would a rebranded Rome with less memory channels?

  • Imagine... (Score:3)

    by qubezz ( 520511 ) on Friday June 14, 2019 @03:49AM (#58759886)
    Imagine a beowulf clust... oh, I guess they did.

  • Can someone please fire AMDs marketing department? In particular whoever thought that was a good name for a CPU. They should just name all of their CPUs after various sharks or dinosaurs. Really anything would be better than Threadripper.

  • $4K just for the CPU?? This is going back to the Bad Old Days where you either had to take out a loan to buy your PC, or put it on a credit card. And then it takes forever to pay off. I'll wait till prices come down.

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