At today’s press conference, AMD has confirmed that the 16 core processor will for most purposes be half of an Epyc processor. This means that the two die MCM chip will feature 4 DDR4 channels and a whopping 64 lanes of PCIe, with all 64 lanes being enabled for all ThreadRipper SKUs. This will be broken up into 60+4: 60 lanes directly from the CPU for feeding PCIe and M.2 slots, and then another 4 lanes going to the chipset (with an undisclosed number of lanes then coming off of it) to drive basic I/O, USB, and other features. AMD seems to be particularly relishing the point on PCIe lanes in light of the yesterday’s Intel HEDT announcement, which maxes out at 44 lanes and no chip below $1000 actually has all of them enabled.
All this competition.
hopefully this means the end of Intels virtual monopoly and better cheaper cpu’s
who knows maybe one day I will get to update Gentoo using a 32 core beast…!
Now looking for Via (Centaur tech) to come up with something new.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
I think hell will freeze over before you see new x86 processors from VIA
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/zhaoxin
They already have… its decidedly last gen but far better than thier old cpus.
Probably since VIAs license for x86 is expiring in 2018 … they are going to market only in China and other places that don’t care about the US’s FTC.
On the one hand, Christmas is coming…
On the other… no way this will fit in my mini-itx case :\
The chip will fit, but nothing else will. You’ll have to make the choice between the ginormous processor or everything else.
Maybe someone will make an extension cable, so the CPU can be housed in it’s own separate chassis.
For a compute box for elastic cloud computing, that is enough.
When it’s a single-die SMP, 64 PCIe lanes isn’t so much (32 per chip). Only benchmarks will be able to tell us if bolting two CPUs together on one die will actually scale productively, nor will this chip be cheap because of that — I’m going to guesstimate approx. $1’300 on the low-end
They have very high yield working for them… so chances are more like $700-1200 price range for the entire lineup.