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AMD made a number of huge announcements at its annual Financial Analyst Day gathering on Wednesday, involving products across its CPU and GPU businesses. Many of the announcements confirm rumours and speculation that have circulated for months. AMD might have decided to go public with them ahead of the annual Computex trade show in order to generate buzz before Intel unveils its own high-performance hardware[1].

Starting with the desktop, AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su confirmed that the company will launch 16-core/32-thread high-end desktop processors. Details are scarce, but the name currently being used is Ryzen Threadripper. These will be the first such CPUs in the world, and will target extreme PC enthusiasts and those whose workloads involve massively parallel tasks such as content creation. Video editing, transcoding and gaming while streaming were specifically named as target workloads.

There's no confirmation of the number of models or variants, much less pricing, though if the performance of the Ryzen 7[2] (Review[3]) is any indication, AMD[4] could try to undercut Intel[5] severely. There is no precedent for a 16-core desktop CPU, but Intel is likely to announce a 12-core model at Computex priced lower than its current top-end Core i7-6950X[6] (Review[7]) which was launched at Rs. 1,69,000. Threadripper will also likely require a new server-class platform when it debuts in "summer 2017". Mainstream Ryzen CPUs will begin appearing inside prebuilt PCs from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer and Asus this quarter.

Next up is the announcement of Epyc, AMD's Zen-based server product formerly codenamed Naples. AMD values the server CPU market at $16 billion. Epyc processors will have up to 32 cores and 64 threads, and will be...

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