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AMD-Wafer-Porn

AMD made a number of physical announcements at Computex, building on what we heard from the company last calendar week and the week earlier at its Financial Analyst Day. AMD has confirmed that its Epyc server family, which we've covered several times in the terminal few weeks, will launch on June 20th. AMD doesn't expect a quick server ramp — CEO Lisa Su has told investors that the company will bring upward product over the side by side few quarters — and has set a goal of retaking 10 percent of the information center business organisation. To put that in perspective, Intel'due south data center business concern was worth $17.2 billion in 2016. Even a 5 percent revenue share, half of AMD's electric current target, would be worth nigh $215 million per quarter to AMD, and those are high-margin dollars that meliorate the visitor'due south overall financials.

Threadripper, with upwardly to 16-cores, 32 threads, quad-channel memory, and AMD's new X399 platform, will besides debut later this summertime, though the visitor hasn't given a launch date beyond "later this summer." All of AMD'southward Threadripper CPUs (and we don't know annihilation yet most the total production stack) will feature 64 lanes of PCIe iii.0 connectivity, different on Intel platforms, where yous have to pay at least $1,000 for a chip that has 44 PCIe lanes. Threadripper pricing has non yet been announced, but AMD is mostly expected to hit Intel difficult on it once again. Intel'south upcoming Skylake-10 fries volition sell more cores per dollar than any previous Intel HEDT line-upward, merely it seems pretty safe to bet AMD will have a chainsaw to Intel's overall price stack.

Radeon-Vega

Meanwhile, we likewise got more information on how Vega will debut, and when various segments will see product. First upward is the Vega Frontier Edition, which volition launch on June 27 and fulfill, barely, AMD's pledge to have Vega in market during the outset half of 2017. The Radeon Instinct M25 won't launch on June 20 alongside Epyc, but AMD is expected to release some boosted details on the card and possibly give some pricing and positioning information.

As for consumer Vega, AMD has stated it will launch the card at SIGGRAPH, an industry event from July thirty – August 2nd. This fulfills Lisa Su's earlier remarks about launching consumer Vega inside a couple of months (from mid-May). Merely SIGGRAPH is a professional person event, non the sort of identify where one usually launches a consumer graphics carte. Information technology's possible that AMD plans to do a joint declaration at the show, with a combined professional person and consumer launch, but we're yet wondering near what kind of availability and pricing AMD volition be able to offering to the general market.

Best-case, the company has engaged in some sleight-of-manus to bring a more than potent GPU to the consumer space than many are expecting. I don't remember the worst-example scenario, in which Vega is but non-competitive, is very likely — but it does seem possible that limited HBM2 availability could create a situation in which Vega, ultimately, is reserved for a relatively pocket-size number of cards. Our sister site Computer Shopper points out that AMD didn't hope Vega availability at SIGGRAPH either, which could mean that the actual launch is farther into August.

I ordinarily savor speculating on how various products volition perform and what launch availability will wait like, but in this instance, I experience similar there's just also little information available. Many of the complaints leveled at Vega are similar to remarks fabricated virtually Ryzen before it launched, and Ryzen has proven to be stronger than expected, not weaker. Then once again, Ryzen didn't rely on a brand-new retentiveness technology that really ought to have been in-market by at present given HBM'south ramp-up during 2015.