Intel may not be the only company preparing to launch a line of high-performance processors with the number 9 in the name (to indicate that they’re better than chips with the number 7 in the name).
AMD is rumored to be working on high-power Ryzen 9 desktop chips with up to 16 CPU cores.
The processors would join the company’s recently launched Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 chips for premium and mainstream desktops, and the upcoming Ryzen 3 processors for entry-level systems.
If the latest leaks are accurate, AMD’s Ryzen 9 1998X will be the company’s new top-of-the-line desktop processor. It’s a 16-core CPU with support for hyperthreading for up to 32 simultaneous processor threads.
Each CPU core has a base clock speed of 3.5 GHz and boost speeds of up to 3.9 GHz, and like other Ryzen processors, the new chip should be unlocked, which means enthusiasts can try to overclock the processor for higher performance.
Don’t expect this chip to show up in notebooks anytime soon: it’s a 155 watt processor.
Other members of the upcoming Ryzen 9 family are said to include 125 watt 10-core and 12-core chips, and 140 watt processors with 14 CPU cores.
For more analysis on how AMD’s upcoming chips compare to Intel’s rumored Core i9 Skylake processors, at least on paper, check out wccftech.
via TechPowerUp
That’s much faster than I expected. It seems kinda funny ryzen 9 and a new i9 line would appear simultaneously.
Pretty good ESXi host CPU.
And yet, many hardware enthusiast sites & gaming sites still recommend Intel’s dual core CPUs. I like the idea of increasing CPU cores as a path for the future, in theory. But until things change so that basically any program can properly take advantage of parallel processing, these kinds of chips will remain niche.
Point taken, but do we really need “any program” to be multi-core enabled? For many of us, there are a few go-to apps that we use all the time. For example, many of us live in Notepad++ or a browser. I see I have 3 Firefox.exe processes running right now, and 120 tabs open. And I often run other processes, such as Windows Media Center, at the same time. So a multi-core processor might be a good choice for me and others, even if apps I don’t use, or use only occasionally, cannot take advantage of available cores.
I think it is still important to code with it in mind, at the very least to deal with resource contention in a graceful way. It can get crowded when you have 4 or 8 or 120 threads talking at once.
I would find it difficult to recommend anything less than a quad-core these days for general computing. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, and any sort of future-proofing will require more cores. Programmers have been generally slow to adopt multithreaded approaches, but multitasking is growing as schedulers get better and better at balancing loads.
Yeah, you probably won’t see 10+ cores in regular consumer devices too soon (my enthusiast-y, “prosumer” build only has 6 cores), but I would love to get my VMs on something like this.
Well, the Ryzen 9 is targeted at the HEDT segment, which has always been a niche market. AMD is definitely not trying to bring 16-core CPUs to the mainstream (at least not yet ;)).
As for app support, Intel’s pricing strategy has so far limited 6, 8 and 10-core processors to deep-pocketed enthusiasts and prosumers, meaning there was little incentive for app and game developers to optimize for more cores. This will only change if more multi-core processors come to the mainstream, which is what AMD is doing with the Ryzen 5 and 7 series.
I’d like to see (and purchase) a 155+ watt APU with enough GPU performance to do VR and with a 4 core low power Ryzen architecture – all combined with HBM so as to save $$$ buying actual memory and also to get that sweet small form factor.
I’m not sure that’s possible. Die size limitations would probably make the price of such a thing quite expensive, but I would be quite happy to be proven wrong!
Both Intel and AMD look to be doing #9 lines. Too bad none of these processors go to 11.
“We’re on cloud 9”
155watt chip? No thanks