16-core, 32-thread versions of AMD Ryzen CPUs codenamed Threadripper will launch this summer, the company revealed at its Financial Analyst Day yesterday.

With one of the gnarliest CPU codenames we've ever seen, the Threadripper multicore monsters will go head to head with Intel's Broadwell-E and upcoming Skylake-E High-End Desktop (HEDT) CPUs alongside a new motherboard platform that promises expanded memory support and I/O bandwidth. That's likely to take the form of quad-channel RAM and more PCIe lanes, similar to Intel's X99 platform, but AMD is saving further details for its press conference at Computex at the end of May.

In addition to Threadripper, AMD also teased Ryzen APUs that pair four cores and eight threads with a Vega-based GPU. AMD claims a "50 percent increase in CPU performance and over 40 percent better graphics performance, at half the power of its previous generation." Once again AMD is saving further details for Computex, but it noted that Ryzen APUs will appear in ultra-portables and premium 2-in-1s in the second half of 2017.

Meanwhile, Ryzen Pro desktop and mobile chips, which offer "enterprise-class support and top-to-bottom manageability," will launch in H2 2017 and H1 2018 respectively.

Finally, AMD unveiled the new Epyc (yes, really) data centre processor. Epyc is the new name for the Naples data centre SoCs that AMD announced earlier this year. Presumably the marketing department went out for a few celebratory beers after coming up with "Threadripper" before returning to work on the data centre part.

The physically massive Epyc chip sports 32 cores and 64 threads, 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes, and eight memory channels per socket for a total of 16 DDR4 channels and 32 DIMMs in a two-socket server. That's a potential maximum of 4TB of memory, which will come in handy for places like VFX render farms where a single frame of a film can consume gigabytes of memory.

The launch of Threadripper follows weeks of rumours surrounding Intel's upcoming Skylake-E processors. The follow-up to Broadwell-E, Skyake-E, is rumoured to sport an all-new Core i9 moniker alongside a new X299 chipset, with the top-end Core i9-7920X part featuring 12 cores and 24 threads. Intriguingly, the rumours also point to Intel launching Kaby Lake-X processors with just four cores and eight threads in the Core i7-7740K and four-cores and no hyper-threading in the Core i7-7640K. [Update: This is probably an i5 rather than an i7, but someone reporting on the rumour made a typo.]

Kaby Lake-X would be similar to the Devil's Canyon chips Intel produced for its Haswell architecture, which were a refined version of existing chips. However, Kaby Lake-X is rumoured to use the new X299 chipset, which would be a dramatic change in tack for Intel. Like AMD, Intel should reveal more about its plans at Computex, which takes place in Taipei from May 30 to June 1.