 What is this last gen trap? AMD, where is my next gen Zen 3 Threadripper? Well, as it turns out, AMD themselves might not know yet because their new Milan Zen 3 Epic processors look so ridiculously overpowered that it's kind of hard to see where Threadripper, or Intel for that matter, fits in anymore. So I'm actually starting to understand why they took a serious business data center product and gave it this misspelled gamery name. Yeah, it's epic, guys, it's epic. Cause they knew it would be. So let's dig through this absolutely huge announcement and then see if we can make some educated guesses about where AMD goes next. Just like you guessed, I'd be making this segue to our sponsor, Seasonic. Never skimp on getting a quality power supply for your rig. Check out Seasonic to find award-winning power supplies and try out their wattage calculator to see which one will suit your needs down below. Yeah, it'll suit your down below needs. Amd's Ryzen 5000 CPUs propelled them to the forefront of desktop performance. And now they're looking to bring that same special sauce to the enterprise with Milan, their third generation epic lineup. Now to say that AMD has completely leapfrogged Intel here would be an injustice. One cannot leapfrog that which one has already frog loped. Okay? And based on the numbers that AMD is showing here, they are gonna have as much as double the performance or more depending on the workloads compared to their competition. This is largely thanks to the Zen 3 architecture, which provides a healthy uplift in performance per clock or IPC over Zen 2. Now we did a brief explainer on how they managed this in our Ryzen 5000 series review. But as a refresher, nearly 50% of the improvement comes from load store and front-end improvements with adjustments to the cache and branch prediction picking up most of the rest. As AMD points out, not only do they now have a full 32 megabytes of level three cache shared across up to eight cores in a retooled layout that no longer splits groups of cores up in compute complexes or CCXs, but instead of doing one load and one store per cycle, the new pipeline is now also capable of doing up to three loads and two stores per cycle, which as you can imagine, well, doubling anything is a big freaking deal, especially for crunching a lot of data. What's more, they have four more table walkers for a total of six now, which means that heavy database workloads that rely on lookup tables will be significantly sped up. Again, big freaking deal for the enterprise because when you're say Twitter or Reddit, you have got a lot of data to sift through. Most of it garbage, but it's a lot of data. And that's not all. AMD is also increasing the number of SKUs available to a total of 19 with anywhere from one to eight cores per die and all but four of them are dual socket capable. That is really scary for Intel, who already needs two sockets to compete with AMD's one. Now of the SKUs that are dual socket capable, there are four that are specifically optimized for per thread performance, which not only gives them higher clocks than the rest of the stack, but they also get as much level three cache as possible per core. And the performance implications here can't be overstated. These CPUs are probably what will end up forming the basis of Zen 3 based threadripper CPUs for enthusiast and workstation users. Regardless of core count and socket compatibility, all of these new epics share the same features, including drop-in compatibility with previous generation epic boards, a little more than a BIOS update and oh, this is pretty cool. Epic can now take advantage of four channel, six channel and eight channel memory, which substantially improves flexibility and deployment. Flexible like our underwear at lttstore.com. There it is. Of course, epic has always been AMD server and data center play, and they seem really proud of the sheer compute power that they can bring to bear, which can reduce total cost of ownership through just increasing the density and lowering the requirements for software licenses in a deployment. But they're also laser focused on the ecosystem itself, which they referred to as the third leg of the stool. I mean, some people have a four legged stool and if they didn't have one, it'd be fine, but I guess they don't. One of the biggest aspects of this has been improving security through hardware features. They've created a fully authenticated boot process starting from before the CPU ever even hits x86 BIOS or operating system code. They've also implemented secure nested paging, meaning that an operating system in a virtual machine is now protected against an insecure hypervisor. So that's the operating system that hosts the virtual one. So for example, if a server in a rack gets compromised somehow, the guest virtual machine running on it will not be directly vulnerable, which would be a huge deal for a VPS host. Speaking of which, we're gonna try making our own Google Stadia using Google Cloud. So get subscribed so you don't miss that Gong show. Chances are though, unless you're doing something crazy, making your own Stadia, you're not running a VPS host at home. So why don't we change gears and do a little bit of theory crafting here? Most people who need more than a Ryzen desktop CPU will be running Threadripper. And because Threadripper development tends to follow Epic, we can make a few predictions for how the next Threadripper CPUs might look. It seems pretty safe to assume that the mainstream Threadripper lineup will consist of skews based on the Perth Red Optimized 24 core and 32 core Epic skews with higher end 48 core and 64 core skews coming later. Unless maybe that doesn't happen. Because in the past, we've seen Threadrippers reach higher clock speeds than their Epic counterparts. But these new Epic CPUs could be a different story because their thermal and power consumption ratings are significantly higher than the second generation Rome chips that they replace. In fact, they're kind of already in line with the Threadripper 3000 series TDPs, which poses a bit of a problem. Without increasing the power consumption and heat output all the way past 300 Watts, how could AMD hope to increase clock speeds for their workstation products? In order to get the Threadripper 3970X to its rated clock, AMD had to bump the TDP by 55 Watts over the otherwise very similar Epic 7742. I mean, surely there's not that much power taken up by the expanded memory controller and secure processor integrated into the IO die, right? So at these kinds of TDP increases, we might not even be able to get a 64 core Threadripper assuming it needed higher clock speeds. Maybe AMD is already telegraphing their next play with the recent release of their Threadripper Pro platform. I mean, on the surface, it didn't make a ton of sense, right? Shiny new chipset and motherboards, dusty old Zen 2 architecture CPUs. So that could be it. Ryzen for consumers with lower core counts, Epic for servers, and then these Epic derived Pro CPUs and Threadripper for consumers quietly goes away. Only time will tell. For now, we can only speculate and look forward to much faster top end CPUs than have previously been possible and tell you guys to make sure you're subscribed because we are hoping to have more coverage of these Epic chips in the weeks to come once we can get hands on with them. And time will also tell whether Intel can catch up to what AMD has been able to accomplish here with their new leadership and old professionals coming back into the fold. I'm actually really excited for competition to return. For now though, AMD, enjoy your time at the top, but don't get too comfortable. Don't become what you've tried so hard to destroy. I mean, just look at me. I was supposed to destroy the segues, not join them. Manscaped offers all in one men's grooming tools that have you covered from head to toe. The Lawn Mower 3.0 Trimmer is waterproof and cordless, making it easy to trim while showering. Their Crop Mop body wipes are infused with cooling aloe vera, keeping your body fresh and cool wherever you are. A portion of every purchase made on manscaped.com goes toward the Testicular Cancer Society to spread awareness for men's health and early cancer detection. And you can get 20% off manscaped with promo code tech to join the fight against testicular cancer at the link below. So thanks for watching guys. Go check out our epic ITX build, 64 cores. And just imagine how much better it will be with Milan. Mmm, 64 cores, Zen 3.