By now, most of us are already familiar with AMD’s recently launched lineup of Ryzen Threadripper processors. That said, most of us are probably not aware of how the platform was created in the first place. Folks at Forbes have recently conducted an interview with top AMD engineers who shared details regarding the inception of Ryzen Threadripper.
The most interesting detail that came out of the interview was how AMD didn’t originally plan for Ryzen Threadripper. Back when AMD first announced the “Zen” CPU architecture, the company originally planned to release two iterations of Zen for different markets: mainstream and enterprise. The initial roadmap only consisted of Ryzen 3, 5 and 7 CPUs as well as EPYC processors.
According to AMD’s James Prior, Ryzen Threadripper was actually made by several AMD employees in their spare time. This “team” consisted of those from AMD’s engineering, business unit and marketing departments – even a handful of people from the press joined in as well. The idea of adding a third platform for Zen was then eventually presented to Jim Anderson, AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager, just before AMD’s Computex 2016 event.
Thus, from that moment on, AMD officially decided that it will be adding a third platform for its Zen CPU architecture. To AMD’s delight, Ryzen Threadripper processors were met with waves of positive reviews. This, of course, isn’t surprising at all given Threadriper’s impressive price to performance ratio and stability.
(Source: Forbes)
