An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Monday, AMD announced Ryzen Pro 3000 desktop CPUs would be available in Q4 2019. This of course raises the question, "What's a Ryzen Pro?" The business answer: Ryzen Pro 3000 is a line of CPUs specifically intended to power business-class desktop machines. The Pro line ranges from the humble dual-core Athlon Pro 300GE all the way through to Ryzen 9 Pro 3900, a 12-core/24-thread monster. The new parts will not be available for end-user retail purchase and are only available to OEMs seeking to build systems around them.

From a more technical perspective, the answer is that the Ryzen Pro line includes AMD Memory Guard, a transparent system memory encryption feature that appears to be equivalent to the AMD SME (Secure Memory Encryption) in Epyc server CPUs. Although AMD's own press materials don't directly relate the two technologies, their description of Memory Guard -- "a transparent memory encryption (OS and application independent DRAM encryption) providing a cryptographic AES encryption of system memory" -- matches Epyc's SME exactly. AMD Memory Guard is not, unfortunately, available in standard Ryzen 3000 desktop CPUs. If you want to build your own Ryzen PC with full memory encryption from scratch, you're out of luck for now.

At an event today, where Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop 3, Windows 10X, and an Android smartphone, the company also unveiled refreshed editions of its laptop-tablet hybrids: the Surface Pro 7, and the Surface Pro X. About the Surface Pro 7, which features a USB-C port: The price tag has also changed slightly: The Surface Pro 7 starts at $749 ($150 less than its predecessor). It's available for preorder today and ships on October 22. Microsoft has simply replaced the Mini DisplayPort with USB-C. There is still a USB-A port for all your existing accessories. Adding a USB-C port finally puts the Surface Pro on par with the Surface Book 2 of two years ago and last year's Surface Go. Surface fans have long asked for USB-C ports and Microsoft has been very slowly delivering. Surface Pro 7 comes with 10th-generation Intel Core processors (upgradeable all the way up to quad-core) and starts at 128GB of SSD storage (upgradable to 1TB). Like its predecessor, the Surface Pro 7 still comes with 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB of RAM. Otherwise, the design is largely unchanged. The Surface Pro 7 still has a 12.3-inch display, 2736 x1824 resolution, and 267ppi. The Surface Pro 6 was available in black and silver, and so is the Surface Pro 7. About the Surface Pro X: Seattle tech giant unveiled the Surface Pro X, the spiritual successor to the Surface, the Surface 2, the Surface 3, and the Surface Go. It's ultra-slim and lightweight, with a bezel-to-bezel 13-inch display and an adjustable kickstand. And it's the first machine to ship with a custom-designed, ARM-based Microsoft SQ1 system-on-chip co-engineered with Qualcomm. The Surface Pro X will be available on November 5, starting at $999, and Microsoft will begin taking preorders today.

On the display front, you're looking at a PixelSense panel with 2880 x 1920 resolution with a 267-pixel-per-inch screen density and a 1400:1 contrast ratio. Microsoft says it has the thinnest bezels of any 2-in-1. Under the hood, the Surface Pro X sports the aforementioned 7-nanometer SQ1, which Microsoft says delivers more performance per watt than the chip in the Surface Pro 6. It's an octa-core processor Qualcomm-designed Kryo cores clocked at 3GHz and running at 7 watts maximum, sitting alongside a redesigned GPU and integrated AI accelerator. Altogether, it delivers 9 teraflops of computational power, with the graphics chip alone pushing 2.1 teraflops.

At its Surface event in New York City today, Microsoft refreshed its Surface Laptop with updated specs, USB-C support, and AMD Ryzen 7. From a report: This is the first time a Surface device has been powered by AMD. Furthermore, while the Surface Laptop 2 only came in a 13.5-inch size, the Surface Laptop 3 is available in 13.5-inch and 15-inch flavors. The Surface Laptop 3 starts at $999 (same as the Surface Laptop 2 and the original Surface Laptop). The 15-inch version starts at $1,199. The Surface Laptop 3 is available for preorder today and ships on October 22. Panos Panay, head of engineering for all of Microsoft's devices, said the Surface Laptop has the highest customer satisfaction of any laptop in its class. He shared that the trackpad is 20% larger, the hard drive is removable, and the laptop is now available in a machined aluminum finish.

Before Silicon Valley became the idea center of the internet, it was a group of factory towns, the blinking heart of "clean" manufacturing, the hallmark of the Information Age. A report adds: Silicon Valley was a major industrial center for much of the 20th century. Semiconductors and microprocessors rolled out of factories scattered all over the area (known on maps as Santa Clara County) from the 1950s to the early 1990s -- AMD, Apple, Atari, Fairchild, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Xerox, to name just a few. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, Santa Clara County added 203,000 manufacturing jobs, 85 percent of them in tech. Beginning in the 1980s, as government contracts disappeared, Silicon Valley companies moved toward creating software, and beginning in the 1990s, companies there largely focused on internet-based applications. Now the area trades mostly in the rarefied and intangible realm of apps and software. It's hard to see that now, when glass-walled office buildings, corporate campuses, and strip malls along highways that bloom into concrete clovers dominate the landscape of this former industrial area. But all of that industrial history left something behind.

The Google Quad Campus looks way too nice to be contaminated with toxic waste: There are matching bikes, a pool with primary-colored umbrellas, and a contained universe that looks more like a college or a park than a satellite campus of one of the biggest companies in the world. But it turns out that this idyllic garden of corporate harmony sits on land that since 1989 has been a Superfund site, a designation the EPA gives some of the most contaminated or polluted land in the country. And while thousands of tons of contaminants have since been removed, it is still being cleaned up. For a few weeks at the end of 2012 and into 2013, toxic vapors got into two campus buildings, possibly exposing the office workers there to levels of chemicals above the legal limit set by the EPA. Santa Clara County has 23 active Superfund sites, more than any other county in the United States. All of them were designated as such in the mid to late 1980s, and most were contaminated by toxic chemicals involved in making computer parts. Completely cleaning up these chemicals may be impossible.

"Linux 5.3 has been released," writes diegocg: This release includes support for AMD Navi GPUs; support for the umwait x86 instructions that let processes wait for short amounts of time without spinning loops; a 'utilization clamping' mechanism that is used to boost interactivity on power-asymmetric CPUs used in phones; a new pidfd_open(2) system call that completes the work done to let users deal with the PID reuse problem; 16 millions of new IPv4 addresses in the 0.0.0.0/8 range are made available; support for Zhaoxin x86 CPUs; support Intel Speed Select for easier power selection in Xeon servers; and support for the lightweight hypervisor ACRN, built for embedded IoT devices. As always, many other new drivers and improvements can be found in the changelog.

dryriver writes: The Amiga was a remarkable machine at the time it was released -- 1985. It had a multitasking capable GUI-driven OS and a mouse. It had a number of cleverly designed custom chips that gave the Amiga amazing graphics and sound capabilities far beyond the typical IBM/DOS PCs of its time. The Amiga was the multimedia beast of its time -- you could create animated and still 2D or 3D graphics on it, compose sophisticated electronic music, develop 2D or 3D 16-Bit games, edit and process digital video (using Video Toaster), and of course, play some amazing games. And after the Amiga -- as well as the Atari ST, Archimedes and so on -- died, everybody pretty much had to migrate to either the PC or Mac platforms. If Commodore and the Amiga had survived and thrived, there might have been four major desktop platforms in use today: Windows, OSX, AmigaOS and Linux. And who knows what the custom chips (ASICs? FPGAs?) of an Amiga in 2019 might have been capable of -- Amiga could possibly have been the platform that makes nearly life-like games and VR/AR a reality, and given Nvidia and AMD's GPUs a run for their money.

What do you think the computing landscape in 2019 would have looked like if the Amiga and AmigaOS as a platform had survived? Would Macs be as popular with digital content creators as they are today? Would AAA games target Windows 7/8/10 by default or tilt more towards the Amiga? Could there have been an Amiga hardware-based game console? Might AmigaOS and Linux have had a symbiotic existence of sorts, with AmigOS co-existing with Linux on many enthusiast's Amigas, or even becoming compatible with each other over time?

An anonymous reader quotes Phoronix: Back on the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" launch day I wrote about how AMD is working to return to open-source BIOS/Coreboot support and now there's further confirmation of their work in that direction. We were tipped off Friday that AMD's Head of Platform Firmware, Edward Benyukhis, publicly posted on LinkedIn that he is "looking to hire someone with solid Coreboot and UEFI background." If you have Coreboot experience or know someone who is, see LinkedIn for contacting Benyukhis.

That's exciting itself and certainly noteworthy, but also notable is AMD is now sponsoring next week's Open-Source Firmware Conference. AMD has joined the likes of Amazon AWS, Arm, System76, TrustedFirmware.org, and other companies in sponsoring this conference about Coreboot, LinuxBoot, and related open-source firmware projects.

Windows Central reports: AMD surpassed NVIDIA when it comes to total GPU shipments according to new data from Jon Peddie Research (via Tom's Hardware). This is the first time that AMD ranked above NVIDIA in total GPU shipments since Q3 of 2014. AMD now has a 17.2 percent market share compared to NVIDIA's 16 percent according to the most recent data. John Peddie Research also reports that "AMD's overall unit shipments increased 9.85% quarter-to-quarter."

AMD gained 2.4 percent market share over the last year while NVIDIA lost 1 percent. Much of AMD's growth came in the last quarter, in which AMD saw a difference of 1.5 percent compared to NVIDIA's 0.1 percent.
The Motley Fool points out that "NVIDIA doesn't sell CPUs, so this comparison isn't apples-to-apples."

But meanwhile, TechSpot reports: German hardware retailer Mindfactory has published their CPU sales and revenue figures, and they show that for the past year AMD had sold slightly more units than Intel -- until Ryzen 3000 arrived. When the new hardware launched in July, AMD's sales volume doubled and their revenue tripled, going from 68% to 79% volume market share and 52% to 75% revenue share -- this is for a single major PC hardware retailer in Germany -- but the breakdown is very interesting to watch nonetheless...

Full disclaimer: German markets have historically been more biased towards Ryzen than American ones, and AMD's sales will fall a bit before stabilizing, while Intel's appear to have already plateaued.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, has reason to be concerned about other chipmakers, like AMD. But he's not worried about Nvidia's own big customers turning into competitors. Amazon, Facebook, Google and Tesla are among the companies that buy Nvidia's graphics cards and have kicked off chip-development projects. "There's really one I know of that have silicon that's really in production," Huang told CNBC in an interview on Thursday. That company would be Google, he said. "But our conversation with large customers is intensifying," Huang said. "We're talking to more large customers."

Google first announced its entrance into the data center AI chip-making world in 2016. As it came up with new versions, the web company pointed to performance advantages over graphics cards that were available at the time. Google hasn't started selling data center chips for training AI models to other companies, though. (Google has started offering various products that use its Edge tensor processing unit chips, but those chips aren't as powerful as the TPU chips for training AI models in Google's cloud.)

Rob Enderle reports on the excitement at AMD's Epyc processor launch in San Francisco: I've been at a lot of AMD events, and up until this one, the general message was that AMD was almost as good as Intel but not as expensive. This year it is very different; Intel has stumbled badly, and AMD is moving to take the leadership role in the data center, so its message isn't that it is nearly as good but cheaper anymore; it is that it has better customer focus, better security and better performance. Intel's slip really was around trust, and as Intel seemed to abandon the processor segment, OEMs and customers lost faith, and AMD is capitalizing on that slip...

AMD has always been relatively conservative, but Lisa Su, AMD's CEO, stated that the company has broken 80 performance records and that this new processor is the highest-performing one in the segment. This is one thing Lisa's IBM training helps validate; I went through that training myself and, at IBM, you aren't allowed to make false claims. AMD isn't making a false claim here. The new Epyc 2 is 64 cores and 128 threads and with PCIe generation 4, it has 128 lanes on top its 7nm technology, which currently also appears to lead the market. Over the years the average performance for the data center chips, according to Su, has improved around 15% per year. The last generation of Epyc exceeded this when it launched, but just slightly. This new generation blows the curve out; instead of 15% year-over-year improvement, it is closer to 100%...

Intel has had a number of dire security problems that it didn't disclose in timely fashion, making their largest customers very nervous. AMD is going after this vulnerability aggressively and pointing to how they've uniquely hardened Epyc 2 so that customers that use it have few, if any, of the concerns they've had surrounding Intel parts. Part of this is jumping to more than 500 unique encryption keys tied to the platform.
Besides Google and Twitter, AMD's event also included announcements from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Dell, Cray, Lenovo, and Microsoft Azure. For example, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has three systems immediately available with AMD's new processor, the article reports, with plan to have 9 more within the next 12 months. And their CTO told the audience that their new systems have already broken 37 world performance records, and "attested to the fact that some of the most powerful supercomputers coming to market will use this processor, because it is higher performing," calling them the most secure in the industry and the highest-performing.

"AMD came to play in San Francisco this week," Enderle writes. "I've never seen it go after Intel this aggressively and, to be frank, this would have failed had it not been for the massive third-party advocacy behind Epyc 2. I've been in this business since the mid-'80s, and I've never seen this level of advocacy for a new processor ever before. And it was critical that AMD set this new bar; I guess this was an extra record they set, but AMD can legitimately argue that it is the new market leader, at least in terms of both raw and price performance, in the HPC in the server segment.

"I think this also showcases how badly Intel is bleeding support after abandoning the IDF (Intel Developer Forum) conference."

Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday released the second generation of its processor chip for data centers and said that it had landed Alphabet's Google and Twitter as customers. From a report: AMD competes against Intel to supply chips for data centers that power internet-based services. Both firms have come to rely on data center chips for growth because personal computer sales have stagnated as users shifted to mobile devices. AMD's newest generation of server chip, called EPYC, uses a new chip-making technology from its contract manufacturers that helps the chips have better performance while consuming less power. Intel, which makes chips in its own factories instead of relying on contractors, is behind schedule delivering chips made with its own newer manufacturing process. It plans to release them next year.

"Today, AMD launched its Rome Second Generation EPYC CPUs, the AMD EPYC 7001 & 7002 series," writes Slashdot reader SolarAxix. "Was the hype real? According to Anandtech's review of the top-of-the-line EPYC 7742 with 64 cores and 128 threads (for a total of 128 cores and 256 threads), it seems to be the case." From the report: ...So has AMD done the unthinkable? Beaten Intel by such a large margin that there is no contest? For now, based on our preliminary testing, that is the case. The launch of AMD's second generation EPYC processors is nothing short of historic, beating the competition by a large margin in almost every metric: performance, performance per watt and performance per dollar. "

An anonymous reader quotes TechRadar: AMD's Ryzen 3000 series processors, spearheaded by the Ryzen 7 3700X, have led what looks like an unprecedented assault on Intel's CPUs, at least going by the figures from one component retailer. The latest stats from German retailer Mindfactory (as highlighted on Reddit) for the month of July show that AMD sold an incredible 79% of all processor units, compared to 21% for Intel.

AMD's top-selling chip was the Ryzen 7 3700X, and get this: sales of that one single processor weren't far off equaling the sales of Intel's entire CPU range (at around the 80% mark of what Intel flogged). In June, AMD's overall market share was 68% at Mindfactory, so the increase to 79% represents a big jump, and the highest proportion of sales achieved by the company this year by a long way.

To put this in a plainer fashion, for every single processor sold by Intel, AMD sold four.

Ryzen 3rd-gen offerings have seemingly sold up a storm in the first couple weeks on shelves, and then slowed down, although that slippage is likely due to stock shortages rather than falling demand (the new flagship Ryzen 9 3900X chip is vanishingly thin on the ground, for example, and is therefore being flogged for extortionate prices on eBay in predictable fashion)... [W]e can throw in as many caveats as we like, but the plain truth (at least from this source) is that AMD's doing better than ever, and grabbing a truly startling proportion of CPU market share -- even with apparent stock issues providing some headwind.

MojoKid writes: AMD's new Ryzen 3000 processors can boost as high as 4.6 GHz, a notable bump over previous Ryzen models, but what about AMD's purported Instructions Per Cycle (IPC) gains? Has AMD's Zen 2 architecture finally caught up to Intel's Coffee Lake-based Core series processors in terms of IPC? To prove this out, HotHardware pitted a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X against Intel's 8-core Core i9-9900K in an array of tests, with both chips locked at 4GHz across all cores and four of the Ryzen CPU cores (or 2 CCXs) disabled (save for a couple of instances to show MT scaling). This allowed AMD's fastest Zen 2-based CPU, with its full 64MB L3 cache complement, to compete against Intel's current fastest desktop chip at identical clock speeds. A series of single-threaded benchmarks were run, in addition to some standard games tests, which are lightly multithreaded. The Intel and AMD multi-core processors essentially traded blows across a number of tests, but Intel won more often than not. The blue team notched IPC wins in SANDRA's Dhrystone integer tests, Geekbench, POV-Ray, LAME MT, and the gaming tests. AMD stole single-threaded victories in SANDRA's Whetstone FPU tests, Cinebench, and Y-Cruncher. While not an outright win for AMD, the company has obviously worked hard to improve 3rd Gen Ryzen IPC throughput, while its multi-core scaling is downright impressive.

"AMD is unleashing an arsenal of products today," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid.

Hot Hardware writes: The Zen 2-based AMD Ryzen 3000 series is easily one of the most anticipated product launches in the PC space in recent memory. AMD has essentially promised to address virtually all of the perceived shortcomings of the original Zen-based Ryzen processors, with the Ryzen 3000 series, while continuing to aggressively challenge Intel on multiple fronts -- performance, power, price, you name it.
MojoKid summarizes their analysis: In the benchmarks, performance has been improved across the board. The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X offered superior single and multi-thread performance versus their second-gen counterparts, and better latency characteristics, that allowed them to occasionally overtake processors with more cores / threads in a few multi-threaded tests. On a couple of occasions, the 12-core / 24-thread Ryzen 9 3900X even outpaced the 16-core / 32-thread Threadripper 2950X. Performance versus Intel is more of a mixed bag, but the Ryzen 3000 series still looks strong. Single-thread performance is roughly on-par with Intel's Coffee Lake based Core i9-9900K, depending on the workload. Multi-threaded scaling is a dogfight strictly in terms of absolute performance, but because AMD offers more cores per dollar, the Ryzen 3000 series is the clear winner here.

Meanwhile, AMD's Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi-powered graphics cards are set to take on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX offerings in the midrange
There's more details in the original submission, and PC World writes that AMD's Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards "represent a fresh start and a bright future for AMD, brimming with technologies that have never been seen in GPUs before." But they're not the only site offering a detailed analysis.

Forbes tested the chips on five high-workload games (including World of Tanks and Shadow of the Tomb Raider) and shared their results: As usual, things are very title and resolution dependent, but in general, [AMD's] RX 5700 XT proved to be a slightly better option at 1080p with the RTX 2060 Super mostly matching it above this... However, the 2060 Super was cooler-running and much quieter than its AMD counterpart, plus I'd argue it's better-looking too... You also get the option of Ray Tracing and DLSS, but even discounting those, the Nvidia card is a slightly better buy overall.
But CNET argues that AMD's new graphics cards "are very quiet. They are bigger and do require more power than the RTX 2060...but the 2060 Super has increased power requirements as well."

TL:DR: There's a chip war going on.

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA just launched three new GeForce RTX gaming GPUs to battle against AMD's forthcoming Radeon RX 5700 series. The GeForce RTX 2080 Super, GeForce RTX 2070 Super and GeForce RTX 2060 Super will all be shipping this month. GeForce RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2060 Super cards are out making the rounds in benchmark reviews, while the RTX 2080 Super will arrive in a couple of weeks. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super is more than just an overclocked RTX 2070 but actually based on the GeForce RTX 2080's TU104 NVIDIA Turing GPU with 40 active SMs, for a total of 2,560 CUDA cores at 1,605MHz and 1,770MHz base and boost clocks, respectively. The RTX 2060 Super is still based on the original TU106 GPU, but it has four additional SMs enabled, which brings the CUDA core count up to 2,176 (from 1,920) at a somewhat higher 1470MHz base clock and boost clock 30MHz lower at 1,650MHz.

There is an additional 2GB of GDDR6 memory on the card too for a total of 8GB now. Performance-wise, both cards are significant upgrades over the originals, with roughly 10 -- 23 percent gains, depending on the resolution or application. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super is often faster than the pricier AMD Radeon VII, especially at 1440p. At 4K, however, the Radeon VII's memory bandwidth advantage often gives it an edge. The new GeForce RTX 2060 Super is faster than a Radeon RX Vega 64 more often than not. It will be interesting to see how these cards compete with AMD's Radeon RX 5700 Navi-based card when they arrive later this month. NVIDIA could have just thrown a wrench in the works for AMD.

Slashdot reader MojoKid writes: AMD announced its 3rd Gen Ryzen 3000 series processors at Computex earlier this month and the company's Zen 2 architecture is promised to bring single threaded performance parity with Intel but exceedingly better multithreaded throughput in content creation and other high-end workloads.

Intel has obviously taken notice of AMD's Zen 2 advancements and nowhere is its renewed keen focus more evident than in an internal memo that just leaked out to public venues. The memo was originally posted on Intel's internal "Circuit News" employee portal and it's quite revealing. The memo, which is entitled, "AMD competitive profile: Where we go toe-to-toe, why they are resurgent, which chips of ours beat theirs", is a surprisingly frank look at how AMD has managed to get the best of Intel, at least currently, and how the company should manage this renewed or "resurgent" competitive threat.

What's most surprising about the memo, which was penned by Circuit News Managing Editor Walden Kirsch, is how flattering it is in general to AMD, pointing out that it was the best-performing stock on the S&P 500 for 2018. In terms of Zen 2 and AMD's Ryzen 3000 series, the author notes, "Intel 9th Gen Core processors are likely to lead AMD's Ryzen-based products on lightly threaded productivity benchmarks as well as many gaming benchmarks," Kirsch writes in the memo. "For multi-threaded workloads, such as heavy content creation workloads, AMD's Matisse is expected to lead." All in, the internal memo is a rather insightful and well-reasoned look at the threat that AMD poses to Intel and how the company might respond.

Thursday the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece about AMD's joint venture with Chinese holding coming THATIC -- titled "How a Big U.S. Chip Maker Gave China the 'Keys to the Kingdom'." The article argues that AMD "essentially granted China access to advanced processor IP that could be used to threaten U.S. national security," reports Forbes.

But they add that the same day, AMD executive Harry Wolin wrote an angry blog post in response, complaining that the story "contains several factual errors and omissions and does not portray an accurate picture." Forbes reports: From Wolin's post, "Starting in 2015, AMD diligently and proactively briefed the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce and multiple other agencies within the U.S. Government before entering into the joint ventures. AMD received no objections whatsoever from any agency to the formation of the joint ventures or to the transfer of technology -- technology which was of lower performance than other commercially available processors. In fact, prior to the formation of the joint ventures and the transfer of technology, the Department of Commerce notified AMD that the technology proposed was not restricted or otherwise prohibited from being transferred. Given this clear feedback, AMD moved ahead with the joint ventures."

Not only does AMD claim it had the green light from multiple government entities to enter into the deal, the post claims that the WSJ article is simply wrong. "The Wall Street Journal story omits important factual details, including the fact that AMD put significant protections in place to protect its intellectual property (IP) and prevent valuable IP from being misused or reverse engineered to develop future generations of processors."

It's just over two weeks until AMD's full Ryzen 3000 family of processors arrive, and it appears Intel is concerned about the effect they may have on its own chip sales. From a report: As such, the company is reportedly planning to reduce the price of its eighth- and ninth-generation CPUs by 10 to 15 percent. The report comes from DigiTimes, citing sources from motherboard makers. It claims Intel has already notified its downstream PC and motherboard partners about the processor price drops, which could see anything from $25 to $75 knocked off the CPUs. If the report is accurate, the enthusiast eight-core/16-thread Core i9 9900K will be one of the chips to see a price reduction, as will the i7-9700K, and the i5-9600K.

AMD is preparing a monstrous 64-core/128-thread Threadripper CPU for launch in Q4 2019. "AMD's largest HEDT processor right now is the W2990X which tops out at 32-cores," reports Wccftech. "This is nothing to sneeze at and is already the highest core HEDT part around but because the world can't get enough of these yummy cores, AMD is planning to launch a 64-core version in Q4 2019." From the report: The platform is called X599 right now although I am told AMD is considering changing the name to avoid confusion with Intel. This is not really surprising since both Intel and AMD HEDT platforms have the same nomenclature and it can get really confusing. I am also told that they they plan to retain the "99" suffix. AMD is planning to launch the 64-core Threadripper part and the corresponding platform in Q4 2019. In fact, that is when you can expect these motherboards to start popping up from various AIBs.

Now my source did not mention a new socket, so as far as I know, this should be socket compatible with the existing TR4 motherboards and only a bios update should be needed if you already own one. What I don't know right now is whether this is a 14nm part or a 7nm part. Conventional wisdom would dictate that this is a 14nm part trickling down from their server space, but who knows, maybe the company will surprise all of us? This is pretty exciting news, because knowing AMD, the 64-core Threadripper CPU will probably be priced in the $2500 to $3000 range, making it one of the most affordable workstation processors around with this many threads.