AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs To Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

More information about AMD's unreleased (and unannounced) enthusiast-grade Ryzen processors is coming to light. Hot on the heels of learning that AMD is prepping a monstrous Ryzen chip with 16 physical cores and 32 threads, the latest rumor is that the processor will be compatible with a modified version of AMD's SP3 server socket for its forthcoming Naples processor lineup.

Naples is what AMD will use to infiltrate the data center market, which has been lucrative for Intel. Those processors will slip into a socket with 4,094 pins. Likewise, AMD's consumer-oriented enthusiasts processors based on Ryzen will also feature a socket with 4,094 pins dubbed SP3r2. But while it will have the same physical specifications and pin count as SP3, they will differ in maximum thermal design power.

Here is a look at the two side-by-side... 
In addition to thermal differences, SP3r2 will only be offered in single-socket form, whereas SP3 motherboards will have dual-sockets for running multiple server CPUs at the same time.

The other thing we learned is that AMD's enthusiast Ryzen CPUs will be called ThreadRipper, an apt designation considering what we already know about Ryzen's multi-threaded performance. Whitehaven refers to the platform, which will support quad-channel DDR4 memory. It will also have more PCI-Express lanes to play with, which comes in handy when utilizing multiple graphics cards and/or those newfangled M.2 NVMe solid state drives that tap into the PCIe bus.

It is shaping up to be an interesting summer. On top of an enthusiast offering from AMD, Intel is readying a new generation of high-end processors, Skylake-X and Kaby Lake X. These will be branded as "Core i9," a new tier that sits atop Core i7. And in addition to all that, new GPU architectures from AMD (Vega) and NVIDIA (Volta) are in the pipeline.