Monster AMD Ryzen 16-Core CPU Could Be On The Way: $1,000 Cheaper And Faster Than Intel

The results are in for Ryzen, and in some tasks, it's very competitive and even better value than Intel equivalents. However, AMD's stance is that Ryzen isn't just for gaming performance, and that's an accurate statement. Ryzen is a great multi-threaded performer and easily beats Intel's more expensive CPUs in rendering and content creation workloads that use plenty of threads. Looking to build on this success, the company is rumored to be working on a monster 16-core, 32-thread CPU.

The post in Anandtech's forum, and discussed on Wccftech.com points at a completely new platform to take advantage of this mega CPU, which has six more cores than Intel's current flagship desktop CPU - the Core i7-6950x which has just 10 cores and 20 threads. If recent performance is anything to go by, with 16 cores on tap, it's likely this CPU could be the ultimate desktop CPU for multi-threaded workloads.

Interestingly, the new platform is supposed to have a Land Grid Array (LGA), with the pins in the CPU socket like Intel has currently - not on the CPU as we have with Ryzen. One thing that AMD's current Ryzen 7 CPUs and premium motherboards lack is quad-channel memory support, which is included on Intel's X99 platform, which is what the trio of Ryzen 7 CPUs released earlier this month are competing with.

All this means that there could be a dedicated HEDT (high-end desktop) platform, for the moment called X399, for AMD CPUs soon, and the CPU itself is apparently huge - twice the size of Intel's 10-core Core i7-6950X. The opposite is true for cost, though; the Intel 10-core retails for around $1,700, but the post claims the 16 core Ryzen CPU could be up to $1,000 less than this, with the flagship SKU sitting around $1000, with some cheaper models too, just like we have now with the three Ryzen 7 CPUs.

The Intel Core i7-6950X was the only Intel CPU to soundly beat the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X in most tests, so AMD is clearly looking to usurp Intel at the high-end with its all-new X399 chipset. As well as quad-channel memory support, it's likely the platform would offer an increased number of PCI-E lanes to cater for numerous PCI-E storage devices and of course multiple graphics cards. At the moment, the flagship AM4 chipset, X370, can only offer 8 PCI-E lanes to a two-way GPU setup, while pairing an Intel Core i7-6850K, 6900K or 6950X with its X99 chipset, gives you far more lanes and bandwidth, with two-way GPU setups benefitting from the full 16 lanes each.

In the meantime, at the opposite end of the spectrum, AMD is due to release its Ryzen 5 CPUs, starting at just $169 for a 4-core model, on 11th April. These will be fighting Intel in the more popular mid-range market where there's less of a need for more than six processor cores. Once again, AMD's offerings undercut Intel, yet offer similar or better specifications, with the AMD six-core parts costing less than Intel's four-core CPUs such as the Core i5-7600K. It's clear, then, that we haven't seen the last Intel versus AMD battle - not by a long shot.