Sunday, May 5th 2019
AMD's Zen 2 Threadripper Conspicuously Absent From Company's Latest Roadmaps
We've all taken a look at AMD's March 2019 product roadmap, which showed us the upcoming 2019 tech the company would be bringing to the table in its "non-stop product momentum". However, it seems that this non-stop product momentum might be coming to an unexpected twist of fate that might delay it from entering the last station - the Zen 2-based Threadripper. In the company's latest May earnings call roadmap, the company silently removed the Zen 2 Threadripper from its product roadmap - where it used to sit right after the launch of Zen 2-based Ryzen products for consumers, is now just a big crop of the space it occupied.
This might mean many things, and a mistake on someone's part while cropping the PowerPoint slide could be the only thing going on here. However, the best and most plausible speculation that can be entertained when one considers this is simple - a supply problem. With the 7 nm node being the newest, most dense fabrication process possible, and with AMD having to share TSMC's 7 nm wafer production with a number of high profile companies - such as Qualcomm, for instance - may mean that supply is simply too tight to support Zen 2-based products across so many product stacks - Ryzen and Epyc - at the same time.
Perhaps AMD has delayed manufacturing of Threadripper Zen 2 products until after the initial bout of sales from their upcoming Ryzen 3000 series CPUs fades away, while also allowing for yields to mature and production wrinkles to be ironed out. It would definitely make sense, as Threadripper is definitely the product to cut in such a case - it doesn't carry as much of an impact on AMD's financials and outlook as a deficient Epyc production would bring, and doesn't get in the way of Ryzen 3000 series production to keep on AMD's momentum against Intel's offerings. This definitely does seem like a smart path for AMD to undertake, though it really is a shame that we seemingly won't be looking at a halo product such as the latest gen Threadripper as soon as we thought we might.
This might mean many things, and a mistake on someone's part while cropping the PowerPoint slide could be the only thing going on here. However, the best and most plausible speculation that can be entertained when one considers this is simple - a supply problem. With the 7 nm node being the newest, most dense fabrication process possible, and with AMD having to share TSMC's 7 nm wafer production with a number of high profile companies - such as Qualcomm, for instance - may mean that supply is simply too tight to support Zen 2-based products across so many product stacks - Ryzen and Epyc - at the same time.
63 Comments on AMD's Zen 2 Threadripper Conspicuously Absent From Company's Latest Roadmaps
Let's all be anti everything so we can hate in equal measure. Fun!
Quit bickering.
Trolls leave.
Only and last warning.
Thank You, have a nice, clean, civil discussion on the topic.
Edit: Lol at TPU being TPU... :(
It only appeared in the past because Intel has offered maximum 4 cores on the mainstream for so long... and they found a marketing way of selling massively overpriced extra cores by calling it "High-End Desktop".
They could have easily made 6-core or 8-core on the mainstream since Broadwell (which is also 14nm, like presend day Coffee Lake) if they really wanted... but with a monopoly and AMD nowhere, they invented this "HEDT" concept instead.
If Zen2 is capable of 16 cores on the mainstream, TR (or AMD's HEDT) is simply unnecessary for anyone but the most extreme workstation users, who still have the choice of the 32-core existing TR.
It could also (almost) kill Intel's HEDT, simply with (much) lower platform price.
Companies should be praised or criticized for their products (quality/performance/utility/features/price, etc) and not because they are big or small companies!
Or are we going to start praising bad products, just because they are from a small or smaller company? (and before there is confusion, I'm not talking about AMD, I'm talking generically about any company).
This doesn't mean that AMD should be excused for bad products (I don't see many people touting the VII as the second coming of Raptor Jesus, so I don't think this is actually happening), or that they're somehow "a good corporation" (I'd argue that those don't exist, as the goal of any profit-oriented business is to extract money from the general public), but that they deserve more praise for (even moderate) success and less criticism for not quite making deadlines than Intel.
That persons comments do not belong here.
I'm not a fanboy of either company, but I'm glad to see AMD doing well. Competition is beneficial to consumers. I doubt we'd have seen Intel increase core counts had AMD not introduced Ryzen.
but the next Threadripper is supposed to have 64 cores, that's on a whole different level, even with a lower clock speed.
I don't think the average TPU member is the target audience, at least I'm not.
That road map is for 2019. AMD could to release TR 3000 Series in 2020 when they have sufficient amount of Chiplet for TR.
And TR release 5-6 month after mainstream(Zen/Zen+) and server(Zen). So if mainstream release in Q3( June 6th month, July 7th month, August 8th month), 6 month after that will be January 2020 - March 2020.
I wouldn't have minded if core counts continued to go up slowly... it was a perfect market segmentation to reality ratio... mainstream had up to 6c/12t while HEDT was that and a lot more. Now, most consumers will think it has 'moar corez sew et must bee bet0r'.... and for those who can use them, that is correct. The problem is most users can't and software is still severely behind as well. As I said earlier, at least back in the day with clock speed wars and IPC, that improved everyone's experience regardless. Here, its really an only if they are used type situation.
At least it's not as bad as Intel's double HEDT lineup: Skylake-X and Skylake-W.I would ask the opposite question; why would anyone need 16 cores (for now) without other "HEDT features"? Except for market hype, why does a mainstream system need 16 cores?
The purpose of HEDT is CPUs for workstations, like content creators and developers, which needs a balance between core count and core speed, along with good memory bandwidth etc. Threadripper 2 largely fails as a HEDT platform due to the latency issues which becomes substantial for 2970WX and 2990WX.