Engineering samples of the design, based on the Zen architecture and utilising a new SP3r2 LGA socket specification, appear to be consumer variants of upcoming server designs.
Engineering samples of the design, based on the Zen architecture and utilising a new SP3r2 LGA socket specification, appear to be consumer variants of upcoming server designs.
AMD’s Ryzen CPUs are now well established in the desktop PC market, comprising dual-core all the way up to eight-core models suiting a range of applications, but it appears that these are far from the limit to AMD’s ambition this year. From Videocardz.com via Via Guru3D comes news of a new CPU class spotted in the wild as engineering samples, CPUs which could herald the release of a High End Desktop Platform based on the AMD Zen server chips.
Codenamed Whitehaven and listed alongside corresponding Hardware IDs, the designs are ostensibly a bigger brother to the mainstream Ryzen range. Rather than being limited to eight physical cores with SMT, Whitehaven CPUs would incorporate up to sixteen cores via four CCX clusters; combined with Simultaneous Multithreading the platform would support up to 32 independent threads, more even than Intel’s current flagship HEDT processor.
Naturally the physical dimensions of the chip would necessitate a new socket design, and new motherboard chipset. The former would be catered to by the new S3 socket (long-form SP3r2 LGA), which would make the chips pinless much like current Intel models. As for new motherboards, it’s also rumoured that an X399 chipset will supplant the current X370 at the top of the stack and support Whitehaven CPUs exclusively alongside quad-channel DDR4 memory.
Current 8-Core Ryzen models are rated at a TDP of 95W, so without a substantial step down in frequency support it’s likely that 16-core Whitehaven parts would be between 135 and 150W. Supposedly the chips will have base frequencies of 3.1GHz that boost to an impressive 3.6GHz, but as with the rest of the leaked information should be taken with a pinch of salt. Notably not present is information regarding PCI-Express lane support.
Can AMD break Intel’s stranglehold on the HEDT and x86 server market? That remains to be seen, but the answer might be clearer after Computex.
SOURCE: Guru3D
