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I don’t understand the logic of waiting so long to launch an already outdated platform when Zen 4 is nearly ready to go. It’s just so late in the product cycle.
by jagger27 5y ago
I don’t understand the logic of waiting so long to launch an already outdated platform when Zen 4 is nearly ready to go. It’s just so late in the product cycle.
I agree that a March launch would mean it would be on Zen 3.
- kllrnohj 5y agoZen 4 is on TSMC 6nm and so is the new line of laptop skus running Zen3+, so I'd guess that they are just waiting for sufficient volumes to release another 7nm Zen 3 product. Epyc & Ryzen almost certainly pull much higher volumes for AMD than TR/TR Pro, and although Ryzen at least has been mostly available for the past couple months it was in short supply for quite a while there. I'd guess they planned on TR / TR Pro being a quicker followup after Epyc 7003 launched, but then chip capacity just wasn't there to justify it. And now it probably is, especially as their new stuff is on a different node.
- jagger27 5y agoBut from a product perspective if there are still no competitors to the extant 2019 Threadripper SKUs, what's the point of such a minor bump today? I don't buy the capacity argument for the exact reason you mention: it's low volume. That's the whole beauty of the Zen architecture, right? They can shift capacity around after the wafer stage. The way I see it, Zen 2 Threadripper is still a good enough product for its goals of a shit load of cores. Zen 3 didn't increase core counts, but Zen 4 does. My suspicion is that AMD probably overproduced Zen 2 TR and is letting its supply run down until it can launch another category redefining product built on Zen 4. Plus, it would look even better in their comparison charts.