AMD vs. Intel: It’s raining CPU cores!
The rst dual-core processors for consumer desktops were introduced in April 2005, over 12 years ago. Intel’s Pentium D “Smitheld” and Pentium Extreme Edition processors packed two cores on the same package, which counted as quite a big deal back in the day.
The year before, AMD showed o its own dual-core Opteron processors in a Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL585 server, but it wasn’t till later in 2005 that the company trotted out the Athlon 64 X2 desktop chips.
These CPUs generally comprised two slower-clocked cores with lower power consumption, so they were one way of increasing performance without incurring penalties like the current leakage that arose from shrinking process nodes.
Fast-forward to 2017, and we have a 16-core/32-thread chip on our hands from AMD in the form of the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X. This is one mammoth chip that lls your palm when you hold it in your hand, and AMD is positioning these processors as do-itall pieces of silicon that can perform in both games and heavily threaded professional applications.
The company says that the PC industry has tried for too long to squeeze users into neat categories of convenience, and it has a point. There are frequent references to the workstation and gaming markets as mutually exclusive spaces, as if people who primarily belong to one don’t ever cross over into the other at all.
But this way of thinking neglects the professional video editor or 3D modeler who wants to play PlayerUnknown’s Battleground while rendering in the background. Or the gamer who wants to compile code in a MacOS virtual machine without having to take a break from fragging.
That’s where a processor like Threadripper comes in with its multitude of cores and threads, primed to handle simultaneous, parallel workloads. To be sure, only a small, niche group of users will benet from this, but Threadripper’s entrance may be precisely what the high-end desktop (HEDT) market needs.