AMD Ryzen Threadripper And Vega Attack Prey At 4K, Quad GPUs Shred Blender, Radeon RX Vega Hits In July

AMD brought along its big guns to the Computex convention in Taipei with demonstrations of both its mighty 16-core Threadripper CPU, and no less than four Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards running in tandem. We also got our first look at Threadripper, a physically large processor with 16 cores and 32 threads with support for quad-channel DDR4 memory and a whopping 64 PCI Express lanes.

"Now it's a little bit bigger than the mobile version you'll notice, but a lot more compute power," AMD's Jim Anderson quipped.


When AMD first announced the Ryzen brand, it demonstrated an 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 processor rendering an image of the chip in Blender. AMD brought out that very same demo for Threadripper. This time, however, the render completed in a matter of seconds as all 32 threads visible in the Task Manager got to work. It is a bit mesmerizing to see so many threads focused on a single goal, and it shows the potential that is available when developers code programs that take advantage of multi-core processing.

Outside of raw compute performance, the other interesting thing about Threadripper is that every SKU will have access to 64 PCIe lanes. Depending on pricing, which was not revealed, this is potentially a big advantage over Intel and its competing Core i9 processor family. Intel recently announced five Core i9 CPUs supporting 44 PCIe lanes, the least expensive of which is priced at $999.


Where things really get exciting is when pairing Threadripper with Vega, AMD's next-generation graphics architecture that will first be made available to professionals in the Radeon RX Vega Frontier Edition. AMD said those cards will hit retail on June 27.

To showcase the kind of power that will be available, AMD demonstrated Threadripper running alongside four Frontier Edition cards in Blender. The demo showed how smoothly a developer or graphics professional could manipulate a high-resolution image from multiple angles.

"You basically can't do this without the horsepower of Threadripper with the four Frontier Edition GPUs," AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su noted. "This is an example of high-performance computing at its best."

While all of that is well and good, AMD did not focus solely on work chores. AMD offered up a taste of what is in store for gamers. To cap things off, it paired a Threadripper CPU with dual Radeon RX Vega graphics cards for consumers. That tandem was able to play Bethesda's Prey at 4K resolution at Ultra visual quality settings, and without any hiccups.

"Our message is that for the true enthusiast class performance capability, this combination will be an incredible combination available with Threadripper and Vega," Dr. Su added.

Radeon RX Vega will launch at Siggraph 2017 at the end of July.