AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper Boasts A Whopping 32 Cores

It's a core numbers game again. This time, however, the competition has reached double digits. While desktop and laptop CPUs still dawdle on quad cores, AMD and rival Intel are heating it up in the server and enterprise market. Just after Intel boasted about its upcoming 28-core chip slated for late 2018, AMD dropped its own bombshell. It has 32 cores and it's not afraid to use it. In fact, it's also coming sooner, around the third quarter of the year.

While gaming is pretty much the pinnacle of desktop computing in terms of needing obscene amounts of computing power, servers are where it's at in the enterprise. That's why AMD is racing against intel to this very lucrative market. And its 32 cores definitely look impressive next to Intel's mere 28.

Those 2nd gen Ryzen Threadripper cores are based on its 2nd gen "Zen" architecture, of course. The 12nm silicon naturally promise better overall efficiency over larger dies but who are we kidding. These things are designed to devour power like no other, with a 250-watt TDP rating. AMD's new Threadrippers are scheduled to rip Intel's position in the HPC market by Q3 this year.

AMD did also have some interesting news for the consumer market but not in the CPU realm. It announced a new generation of Radeon Vega GPUs based on the smaller 7 nm process. But while these graphics cards seem to be aimed at datacenters, a Radeon RX Vega56 "nano" card is also under development for small form factor gaming PCs.