It looks like Roman “der8auer” is in love with delidding CPUs. Bringing out the razor blades and soldering heat gun he’s very carefully the heatspreader from an upcoming Rzyen Threadripper CPU and what’s underneath is interesting to see but it was somewhat expected.


Although it was kind of expected to see that Ryzen Threadripper comes with four eight-core dies it’s good to see this confirmed, since now an entirely new realm of assumptions opens up. But for now let’s stay with the facts, as there are still some that are interesting as well. As the images from “der8auer” show, AMD is soldering the heatspreader to the four die MCM (Multi Chip Module) and for that purpose they’re using indium solder and gold contacts to optimize the heat transfer. Compared to Intel’s HEDT chips, where chipzilla is using cheap TIM, this is great to see and hopefully it will very positively affect temperatures. Nevertheless malicious tongues would say that the Ryzen Threadripper chips produce so much heat that there was simply no other option than going for a high-end soldering process. If that is truly the case we’re quite certain it will become visible when the chips launch and overclocking headroom is determined.

Now to that “new realm of assumptions” I’ve been writing about. First and foremost there is the question whether AMD is smuggling four working and no dead dies or two working and two dead dies onto the PCB. With AMD having a long history of “unlockable” chips the guesswork would be that all those dies are actually working. Supporting that theory is the fact, that AMD is already achieving high Yields when it comes to producing Ryzen dies, reducing the likelihood that there are dead dies underneath the Ryzen Threadripper heatspreader.

If it was actually the case that AMD is disabling some of the dies/cores from factory and maybe they even do that through a microcode “update” then there is a realistic possibility that they could come up with Ryzen Threadripper chips that feature more than 16 cores. Looking at the model numbers of the we now have the 12-core 1920X and the 16-core 1950X, which would allow for let’s say a 20-core 1980X or something similar to be launched at a later stage.

By the end of the day we can assume whatever we want the future is going to tell us what’s really going on on the minds of the AMD employees. Nevertheless it’s great to see that there appears to be some additional performance slumbering underneath that Ryzen Threadripper heatspreader.





Source: der8auer YouTube Channel