Computex: AMD Demonstrates Upcoming Ryzen and Vega-based Products
AMD used its Computext event to showcase new hardware based on the new Ryzen processor, announced that the 16-Core ThreadRipper is coming thi summer, along with the Epyc and the Vega Frontier and RX graphics cards.
"We celebrate 30 years of AMD in Taiwan at Computex this year with great momentum around our new high-performance computing and graphics products," said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "At Computex we highlighted the next wave of AMD products that will come to market, including our upcoming EPYC family of processors for datacenters, high-end Radeon Vega-based graphics cards, and new AMD Ryzen Threadripper and Ryzen mobile processors. We were thrilled to be joined by customers and partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo to showcase their latest AMD Ryzen-powered PCs."
AMD announced the worldwide launch date for EPYC, the new AMD family of 32 core and 128 PCIe lane Epyc CPU for servers, are scheduled to launch on June 20th 2017.
Following the recent launches of seven AMD Ryzen desktop processors, including AMD Ryzen 7 and AMD Ryzen 5, AMD outlined momentum for Ryzen. Building on the Ryzen channel foundation, AMD announced that all of the global PC OEMs expect to have Ryzen-based designs in the market by end of Q2 2017, giving consumers a wide range of premium and gaming towers, and all-in-ones, powered by Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 desktop processors. The Ryzen-powered Windows-based systems from Acer, Asus, Dell and Lenovo on display at Computex 2017 include:
- Acer Aspire GX-281 Desktop
- ASUS G11DF Desktop & ASUS Republic of Gamers Strix GL702ZC desktop replacement - the first 8-core gaming notebook
- Dell Inspiron Gaming Desktop and Dell Inspiron 27 7000 Series AIO - Computex d&i award winner
- Lenovo IdeaCentre 720 and Lenovo IdeaCentre 510
AMD recently announced the Ryzen Threadripper CPU, designed for the high-end desktop (HEDT) market. Launching "this summer", the 16 core processor will for most purposes be half of an Epyc processor. This means that the two die MCM chip will feature 4 DDR4 channels and a whopping 64 lanes of PCIe, with all 64 lanes being enabled for all ThreadRipper SKUs. This will be broken up into 60+4: 60 lanes directly from the CPU for feeding PCIe and M.2 slots, and then another 4 lanes going to the chipset to drive basic I/O, USB, and other features.
The launch chipset for ThreadRipper will be the X399 chipset. AMD announced high-performance motherboard designs from ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI, built upon the X399 chipset.
At Computex 2017, AMD delivered several Ryzen Threadripper and Radeon "Vega" demonstrations, including Ryzen Threadripper and dual Radeon "Vega" based-GPUs running Bethesda's new Prey title at 4K resolution.
The previously announced Vega Frontier Edition card will be available on June 27th. The Frontier Edition is AMD's first batch of Vega-based cards, and is being marketed specifically towards early adopters in the professional segment. A price has not been announced, but expect it to be high.
AMD CEO Lisa Sue promised more information on the Vega-based Radeon Instinct MI25 on June 20th.
AMD has also announced a date where they'll announce the consumer-oriented Radeon RX Vega. The card's launch will be taking place at SIGGRAPH this year, the Association for Computing Machinery's annual graphics conference. SIGGRAPH runs from July 30th to August 3rd.
AMD also demonstrated publicly for the first time a Ryzen mobile APU in an ultraportable reference design, bringing 4 cores, 8-threads and "Vega" architecture-based graphics into a sub-15mm thickness notebook design. The demo featured the Ryzen mobile-powered notebook playing HD video content.