AMD has had its hands full with launching Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 in the last few months, and they’ve managed to also launch a new platform with DDR4 support alongside some decent overclocking software for the Ryzen family. It’s already been quite a busy year for them, and according to new rumours, it’s about to get even busier. A member of the AnandTech forums has posted new details from a source inside PC testing circles that AMD is working on a high-end desktop platform (HEDT) to combat Intel’s chips in the Core i7 range, with the Core i7 6950X being the current flagship.

Credit for the rumour goes to “OrangeKhrush”, who’s posted a few details about the new platform from AMD. The leaks originate from the China-based Chiphell forums, where almost every leak about new silicon seems to start. The post reveals a couple of details about the socket design, as well as the possibility that AMD’s HEDT platform boasts a quad-channel memory controller.

“Public knowledge by now but AMD has a new HEDT platform coming out in a couple of months. You’ll see more of it at Computex I believe. It’s a 16 core /32 Thread, quad channel behemoth. And it is insanely quick in the tests that Ryzen is already excelling at. So Cinebench, and all other related productivity programs. The gaming issues that were causing the Ryzen AM4 CPUs to behave erratically to say the least have been ironed out. It’s akin to a newer revision on a newer platform. This should be competing with the Xeon and of course 6950X Intel offers for $1700~$1800USD, but at about $1,000 USD if not less for some Skews. Coming soon.

CPSs are pretty big physically, about twice the size of surrent 6950X CPUs and a bit more perhaps. And if you were hoping for pins, nope it’s strictly LGA! It’s NOT 8 channel, but Quad.

Will be a splendid competition between X299 and this AMD platform. Skylake-X is pretty good, not revolutionary but a meaningful step up in IPC and the clocks are pretty high as well. If Intel will have a 32 core part to compete on X299 remains to be seen, but the HEDT platform is going to change quite a bit in the next 4 to 6 months.?”

The post adds that there’ll be new silicon revisions for Ryzen and the HEDT platform, and that most of the teething issues seen in the initial batch of chips at launch will be solved. All of these things seem quite unreal, but it’s probably all true.

A source that I spoke to today confirmed some, but not all of these details. The use of an LGA socket is confirmed (although server chips have used LGA for more than a decade), and the core count is correct. Any pricing speculation, though, is just that: speculation.

AMD has an upcoming server platform called Naples, which launches with dual-socket motherboards featuring 16 channels of DDR4 memory support, as well as Zen-based processors with up to 32 cores and 64 virtual threads, as well as 64MB of L3 cache. Considering that Ryzen 5 processors are based on the same die as the Ryzen 7 chips, that means that AMD’s Naples platform starts out at 32 cores and 64 threads, and scales down from there as they bin the faulty chips.

However, it seems more likely that this new family of processors uses a different die starting out at 16 cores and 32 threads, scaling down from there into cheaper designs with 14, 12, and 10 physical cores. That gives AMD a lot of room to play around with the pricing, and perhaps they’ll start out with the 16-core processor retailing for less than what Intel charges for the Core i7 6900K, which is currently at $1,050 in the US.

Source: AnandTech forums