Rumors of the AMD restructure of their product lines abound today.AMD drops all mention of Threadripper product updates on their web pages, leading one to think that the Treadripper line is perhaps now past tense in AMD's planning anyway. AMD will not say anything at this time as they want to continue moving out the old Threadripper products that are in the pipeline at full price.
AMD is sending four more current 6 core 12 core and 16 core Ryzen samples out to board makers --- the new 12 core Ryzen is REALLY REALLY FAST and the 16 core Ryzen is energy efficient, flexible and still pretty durn FAST all on its own merits. Apparently the 16 core outperformed the Threadripper product at far lower cost.
The new 6 core jobbie was sent out to the little board makers as it is now the least processor AMD supplies and the little board guys are used to buying 2 core processors from AMD .....
They will have to roll down to the graphics equipped laptop processors if they want only 4 cores any more.The 8 to 12 core Ryzen is SPECIFICALLY what you would want for gaming as it is tuned and sorted for SPEED. Both the 12 core and the 16 core Ryzen outperform Threadripper because of the wider pipes and better memory usage, plus smaller faster lithography on the chiplets. The 12 core is cheaper, and it is still enough to kick all Intel processors and the old Threadripper to the curb. 16 cores Ryzen is more better, but more expensive of course. Beyond 16 core Ryzen lives the entire range of Epyc server processors if you needed more processing speed than that.
The 16 core Ryzen is what you would want for everything consumerish that is based on heavy duty parallel processing computational number crunching & data analysis sorts of things that you need to do now-a-days.The latest 16 core Ryzen kicks the old Threadripper products in the teeth as far as lower power consumption and faster processing goes. And instead of costing $1,200 the 16 core Ryzen is going to cost ~ $699 > $799 ~.
Threadripper looks to be about done as a product line, as once you go past the Ryzen 16 core chipset you tread the turf of the new Epyc line of server processors.
Please remember, the chiplets in the Epyc servers are the same chiplets that are in Ryzen, so sorting for compute speed, overclocking and the various differentiating center core functions make up all the differences in the products, going well beyond just the varying number of chiplets involved.
The low end AMD Epyc server processors now cost a lot less than Threadripper used to cost ----- and the 12 core and 16 core Ryzen cost less yet again and yet can kick any of the Intel Core i9 products in the teeth for much much lower cost and greater performance.
Has it sunk in on you yet that the least core count of any new AMD consumer processor being sampled now is Six (6) Cores ???? The new new consumer bottom end for AMD is Six (6) Cores ????Factoids worth remembering: Currently chiplets are yielding at the 70% level, fully populated, testing says everything is good on all cores, yep, running at the 70% type level. This is a very good initial yield level and these yields will only improve over time.
Remember, individual chiplet speeds and overclock levels can vary, so the chiplets are tested and binned like with like during chiplet testing so by the time the chiplets are pulled to be packaged into a processor AMD already knows what sort of speeds and overclock-ability they will most likely get out of it.
Highest truncation level is currently 2 cores out of the 8 on the chiplets so you can see where the least & lowest AMD products will come from. Supply of these chiplets is some subset part of 30% with supply going down over time as chiplet production gets better and better.
AMD originally had plans to truncate all the way down to 2 cores, but TSMC's EUV direct burn process is doing better than that, so that lower 4 and 2 core grades have kinda got forgotten about at the moment ......
All chiplets start out as groups of 8 cores, next sorting drop down is 6 cores (two burned off)
next drop down is 4 cores (four burned off) and currently that is the worst of the worst anybody anticipates seeing.
I would say bulk chiplet production and building differentiated products from sorted and truncated chiplets saves a whole lot of scrap cost and makes for better running assembly processes and for better smoother operating chipsets.
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Come time to roll the lithography level down to 6nm (soon) or 5nm or 4nm or 3nm then all AMD has to do is run some wafer fulls of each of the new smaller design chiplets and sort them to see which process operates and yields the best. The new chiplets can fit on the same CPU die in the same locations.
Remember, the chiplet packaging equipment remains the same, as all the connection traces for the center chip are still the larger 14nm traces that all remain the same. Automation for packaging the CPU together remains the same, the sorting equipment uses the same ball grid, edge traces and pin configurations so you can simply sort and bin your new grade of smaller lithography chiplets and then put together into completed CPUs and send them out to the vendors for testing, evaluation and motherboard & BIOS tweeking.
Intel has nothing to even play on the same playing field any longer ........