CES is basically over, and the presentation I was most excited about has been held and analyzed all over the internet. I just wanted to share a little bit of my enthusiasm. I am of course talking about the AMD Keynote.

CEO Lisa Su talked a lot, trying to affirm that AMD is a business parter companies can work well together with. And they need this, they need to establish a position where companies use their stuff, for data centers and whatnot, and gain a little bit more ground.

Apart from talking, she also showed us some of the upcomming Ryzen 3000 series. Just let me go off on a tangent here and let me tell you how terrible it is that the Ryzen 3000 series for Mobile, is based on the Ryzen 2000 desktop series. That's just terrible marketing.

But back to Ryzen 3000, for Desktops. This is going to amazing. The chiplet design is genius, and the ability to match an 8 core cluster with either another CPU cluster or a GPU module (or perhaps something else entirely, like a DSP or FPGA?) is going to be very helpful. Not only do I imagine that this helps a lot with yield, but also ability to adapt to and meet market needs.

What I'm really looking forward to though is the 3000 series Threadripper for the TR4 socket. As we know, TR4 differs from SP3 in that it "only" has 4 out of 8 memory channels hooked up, and the 2990WX suffers a little from this. Two of the CPU clusters do not have direct access to memory. Well, back to the Ryzen 3000 chiplet design. Will an IO die on a 32+ core 3000 series Threadripper alleviate this? That could be really cool. I hope we'll get to see something like that. My reasoning here is that I don't think we'll see a 16 core AM4 processor. It would consume too much power and generate too much heat for such a small package, and the power supply on 300- and 400 series motherboards are not up to that. Perhaps by requiring an upgrade of some kind. But what do I know. :)

I'd also like to point out that we don't know anything about what Intel will bring to the table, we only saw the 8 core engineering sample match the 9900k. We don't know the clocks, so we can't really say anything about IPC gains. We don't know anything about single core performance. Will Intels 10nm stuff blow it out of the water? Probably not, but we don't know yet.

Finally, please give me this in a laptop! 7nm cores with some 7nm graphics in a 14" case. That'd be sweet.