As far as processor platform announcements go, this year’s Computex has actually been very interesting. Yesterday we covered Intel’s keynote speech event where Gregory Bryant officially announced Intel’s Basin Falls platform which included both Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X processors. The announcement included acknowledgement that the series would include an 18-core, 36 thread Extreme Edition flagship model. Today was AMD’s turn to woo the media, which they did at their press event where the company finally gave the world more details about their forthcoming Threadripper series of CPUs.

The big news from a technical standpoint is the information they showed about what Threadripper will actually be when it arrives at some point ‘this summer’. AMD confirmed that the new processor series will feature a 16 core processor with 32 threads with the platform using a new socket design and the AMD X399 chipset which supports quad-channel memory. One additional detail that came out of the event is the fact that the new platform will boast x64 PCI Express 3.0 lanes – that means that you’ll get three x16 lanes for graphics, plus x4 for storage. That’s significantly more than the x24 lanes that you currently get with Ryzen 7 processors. So far, AMD has not confirmed pricing.

Other news from the press conference includes details about AMD’s forthcoming EPYC-branded server chips which will offer 32 cores and 128 lanes of PCIe 3.0. The EPYC series is AMD’s main weapon to get back into the server space currently dominated by Intel and is expected to launch on June 20th. Regarding Threadripper CPUs, AMD mentioned only that it will arrive some time this summer. Plenty to look forward to.