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AMD: Hey Intel, we have lots of CPU cores too

The chipmaker’s new Ryzen Threadripper CPUs pack almost as many cores as Intel’s new chips, and will ship in summer.

Aloysius Low Senior Editor
Aloysius Low is a Senior Editor at CNET covering mobile and Asia. Based in Singapore, he loves playing Dota 2 when he can spare the time and is also the owner-minion of two adorable cats.
Aloysius Low
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AMD's new 16-core Ryzen Threadripper CPU is all set to take on Intel's 18-core Core i9 in high-end desktops.

Making the announcements on Wednesday in Taipei at its Computex press event, the company said the new CPUs would be shipping in summer 2017. It's not the first time AMD's debuted multicore chips though -- earlier models like the Ryzen 7 featured up to eight cores.

The new, powerful CPUs come as AMD tries to catch up to both Intel and Nvidia's industry dominance, who have left the chipmaker somewhat behind in both CPU and GPU departments, respectively. In 2016, AMD's market share in desktop PCs was at its lowest in a decade, powering only 13 percent of PCs, compared to Intel's 87 percent, according to IDC.

AMD's CEO Lisa Su, however, tried to paint a sunny picture at the press conference. 

"AMD really loves the PC business, we drive over 250 million units a year," said Su.

The new Ryzen Threadripper CPUs are based on the company's Zen-core architecture, with the base model sporting 10 cores on the CPU. All chips in the Ryzen Threadripper range will support quad-channel DDR4 memory. Major Taiwanese brands such as Asrock, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI will have motherboards ready when the chip ships. Pricing was not announced, but expect the chips to be competitive with Intel.

Furthermore, AMD is not taking Nvidia's GPU lead lying down -- the press event also saw a teaser of its new Radeon RX Vega, aimed at competing with Nvidia's top-end GeForce GTX 1080 cards. More details on the Radeon RX Vega range will be revealed in July at Siggraph 2017.

That said, if you want to get your hands on a Radeon RX Vega GPU, there's the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, available on June 27. It's meant for data scientists and won't be as good at gaming as the RX version, though.

Lastly, AMD also announced a new platform for notebooks, Ryzen Mobile, that will feature its Zen processors as well as Vega-based graphics. AMD also claims better battery performance than its competition. Ryzen Mobile is set to launch in the second half of the year. 

Correction, June 6 at 9 p.m.: The AMD CPUs were named incorrectly and have been updated to reflect the correct branding.

Check out the rest of CNET's Computex 2017 coverage here.