2019 Tech Preview

- Zak Storey & Jeremy Laird

THE BATTLE FOR PROCESSING SUPERIORITY

What does the future of high-end tell us about the destiny of mainstream processing?

NOTHING’S BETTER for the tech industry than a little competition, and that’s something Ryzen has very much brought to the table over the last two years. Consider this: Since the beginning of 2017, we’ve doubled the number of cores available to mainstream processing parts. From the very bottom rung, with Pentium and Athlon CPUs, all the way up to the Core i9s and Ryzen 7s, Intel and AMD have produced an epic lineup of chips, with twice as many threads as before. Look at high-end desktop processors, and that figure has almost quadrupled. Crazy. In early 2017, Intel’s 10-core Core i7-6950X would set you back $1,723; today, you can buy AMD’s TR 2990WX, with an incredible 32 cores, for just $6 more.

Are we likely to stop here? We doubt it. With AMD announcing its EPYC 2, Rome, server processors, due to launch in the second quarter of this year, the core war is still very much in full flow. Packing 64 cores and 128 threads on a single processor, with a far superior memory interface design than previously, supporting PCIe 4.0, and on TSMC’s 7nm manufacturing process, AMD’s next-generation server parts look as though they’re going to be phenomenal computational monsters. There are even rumors of a 29.4 percent performance increase in single core IPC, all down to architectural advancements and floating point calculation optimizations, rather than simply increased clock speed and voltage.