Advanced Micro Devices announced its Ryzen Threadripper processor today, as well as its new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics processing units (GPUs). And the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said that these chips are going to make gamers very happy.
In a demo at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, AMD executive Jim Anderson showed off the new flagship central processing unit (CPU), the Ryzen Threadripper. The processor is based on AMD’s Zen architecture, which can process 52 percent more instructions per clock cycle compared to AMD’s older CPUs.
“Ryzen Threadripper is targeted at the highest performance PC systems,” Anderson said.
The Threadripper is coming this summer, and it has 16 cores capable of running 32 threads. It supports 64 lanes of PCIe 3.0 devices, such as graphics cards. It has four channels of DDR4 memory. It’s about twice as fast as the 8-core Ryzen 7 desktop processor that AMD introduced three months ago. ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSi will have motherboards ready when the chip launches.
AMD showed a Threadripper running Blender with four Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics processing units (GPUs). It visualized a very complex rendering of a scene with a robot.
“You basically can’t do this without the horsepower of Threadripper with the two Frontier Edition GPUs,” Su said. “This is an example of high-performance computing at its best.”
Su also said, “We love gamers, as part of AMD.” And she proceeded to show a demo of Prey running at 4K resolution. I’ve played Prey, and the scene that AMD showed happened to be the most intense action scene in the entire game. Here’s what it looked like on my standard PlayStation 4 (about four minutes into the video).
On the Ryzen, the same scene in the same game played without a hitch. But it looked much prettier on the Threadripper.
Prey ran on a Threadripper with two Vega graphics chips. Vega GPUs use high-bandwidth memory to handle big data sets. The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics chip debuts on June 27. It has 64 compute units, 25 teraflops of performance, and 16 GB of high-bandwidth memory.