AMD to announce 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen at Computex in May, suggest rumours

Rumour would confirm leaks of 'behemoth' AMD microprocessors outed in February last year

AMD is rumoured to be preparing a 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen CPU that it will unveil at the Computex trade show in Taiwan at the end of May.

The CPU, the biggest Ryzen product to date, would come before the company launches the budget Ryzen 3, which is expected to debut in early July.

The part is intended to take-on the Intel Xeon and its high-end products based on the Broadwell-E and Skylake-X architectures.

The new device from AMD would cost around $1,000 - making it the most expensive Ryzen microprocessor to date - and would be aimed squarely at enterprise workloads, rather than the enthusiast focus of the recently released Ryzen 7. It would, though, be several hundred dollars cheaper than the Intel silicon it is intended to compete with.

However, it will probably require some minor revisions to the architecture to make the most of that many cores, particularly an increase in the bandwidth of the CPU Complex (CCX), which enables cores to share the level-three cache. Currently fixed at 22Gb, it has been identified as a potential bottleneck, especially if AMD chooses to scale-up the number of cores.

The rumours have been published on the Overclock.net forum by a poster claiming to have an inside source at AMD. The company, the poster added, would reveal details at the Computex trade show in Taiwan at the end of May.

"It's a 16 core /32 Thread, quad channel behemoth. And it is insanely quick in the tests that Ryzen is already excelling at," claimed the source. "So [that means] Cinebench, and all other related productivity programs."

The rumour would be congruent with leaks in February last year that indicated that the Zen architecture underlying Ryzen could run to as many as 32 cores - that leak came via an over-enthusiastic engineer at CERN, who had been briefed with details about the forthcoming architecture by AMD itself.

Although the Ryzen has been criticised for its disappointing performance for gaming, relative to Intel, it has impressed as a workstation CPU for software that takes full advantage of the cores and multi-threading it offers.

Indeed, Ryzen has posted impressive, Intel-beating scores in Cinebench, the CPU benchmarking software from Maxon, the same company behind the high-end Cinema 4D package. Early reviews have backed up Ryzen's performance on such software.

However, the poster also went on to suggest that AMD had identified and ironed out the issues that early adopters of the Ryzen microprocessor and AM4 motherboards had experienced in terms of gaming, and that these would be reflected in "new silicon revisions". The source added: "Performance is coming, but only if you haven't bought a chip yet."

Hardware site ExtremeTech, however, suggested that the rumours ought to be taken with several fistfuls of salt - especially the claim that the performance problems experienced by gamers have been sorted out.

"It's true some motherboards had early BIOS problems that made them perform more poorly than they should've in gaming benchmarks. AMD said this issue is because games compiled prior to Ryzen do not accurately detect its capabilities or take advantage of the CPUs architecture," it suggested.

It continued: "Some games may indeed be ironed out if developers release patches to improve Ryzen's performance, but the issue isn't in the thread scheduler and it doesn't seem to be something AMD can improve on its own."

Most mainstream users, though, will probably be more interested in the Ryzen 5 that will be available within three weeks.