Close to the Metal Ep. 50: We talk Threadripper and Vega at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT

By Matthew S. Smith Published August 1, 2017

AMD’s release of its Ryzen processors earlier in 2017 was just the beginning of an eventful year for the company. On Sunday, August 30, the company revealed its next major chip – Threadripper.

With up to 16 cores and 32 threads, the processor is among the most powerful ever available to consumers. It represents not only a new high-end for AMD, but also an emerging trend of extremely powerful hardware that targeted the consumer market. Both AMD and Intel are working on chips with extreme core counts and extreme prices.

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And that wasn’t all. AMD also finally took the veil off its first gamer-focused Vega cards, the Vega 64 and 56. Priced at $500 and $400 respectively, the cards are going to take on Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. The company also announced a liquid-cooled version of Vega 64, only available in a bundle, alongside a smaller air-cooled version the Vega Nano.

We’ll cover these announcements, and more, in this week’s Close to the Metal.

Close to the Metal is a podcast from Digital Trends that takes a deep dive into computing and PC gaming topics. Each show, we’ll focus in on one topic, and leave no stone unturned as we show off the latest in hardware and software. Whether it’s the latest GPU, supercomputers, or which 2-in-1 you should buy, we break down the complicated jargon and talk about how user experience is affected in the real world. Please subscribe, share, and send your questions to podcast@digitaltrends.com. We broadcast the show live on YouTube at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT every Tuesday.

Matthew S. Smith

Senior Editor, Reviews

Matthew S. Smith is the former Lead Editor, Reviews at Digital Trends. He previously guided the Products Team, which dives…

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