TAIPEI—AMD today showed off the second generation of its Threadripper CPUs for high-end desktops, which will be ready to purchase by the end of the year.
The most notable improvement for the second-generation chip is an increase in the maximum number of cores to 32. Threads also get a boost, up to a whopping 64 on the high end. Currently, the most powerful Ryzen Threadripper chip is the 1950X, which comes with 16 cores and 32 threads.
Like the current crop of second-gen Ryzen chips, the new Threadripper will be based on the 12nm Zen+ architecture. AMD decided not to change to a 10nm architecture for the second generation because it is working on a new Zen 2 architecture that will be based on a 7nm production process.
At Computex here, AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company's engineers have started testing the Zen 2 chips, and the first products based on them will be the second-generation Epyc CPUs for data center computing, which will arrive next year.
Other than the core and thread counts, AMD didn't share many more details about the second-gen Threadripper chips. The company did perform a demo on stage comparing the 32-core and 24-core versions with the Intel Core i9-7980XE. The 24-core Threadripper finished a 3D rendering of a video frame in 29 seconds, while the Intel chip hadn't finished by the time the demo was over.
AMD also teased improvements to its Vega graphics chips. A new "nano" version of the Vega 56 graphics card made by PowerColor is now available for installation in smaller desktops, while an entirely new Vega architecture based on a 7nm production process will be available in server and workstation versions later this year.