AMD Zen 16-Core Monster Pictured For The First Time

AMD’s New Horizon event is just around the corner and should include demos showcasing the company’s highly anticipated Zen architecture. Of course, Zen is a landmark release for AMD which ranges from affordable gaming solutions all the way up to server processors. Recently, AMD’s 16-core SoC “Naples” enterprise chip was pictured for the first time in a dual-socket motherboard. This CPU has a staggering 32-threads and designed to compete with Intel’s Xeon line. Rather impressively, it’s not AMD’s flagship offering and there’s a 32-core, 64-thread product being prepared; this should provide a good boost compared to Intel’s E7-8890 v4.

As you can see, the 16-core version is quite large and makes other Summit Ridge processors seem tiny. The photos clearly show two Zen SoCs in an actively cooled server which works alongside two Radeon Pro graphic accelerators. Interestingly, the 16-core CPU opts for the Land-Grid-Array instead of a Pin-Grid-Array commonly used on AMD’s processors. This means the pins are positioned in the socket and not onto the CPU itself. I’m not entirely sure why this design has been used for the top-tier server end. Whatever the case, it’s great to see different flavours of AMD’s new architecture and the reveal tomorrow will certainly be worth a watch.