In context: AMD's Threadripper 7000 lineup is eagerly awaited by industry watchers and DIY enthusiasts alike, as it will mark the first desktop Threadripper launch for the company in nearly four years. AMD last launched its baseline Threadripper series in 2019, when its 3900X CPUs crushed Intel's HEDT lineup in the content creation market.

AMD is reportedly prepping to launch its next-gen Ryzen Threadripper 7000 'Storm Peak' CPUs in the second half of this year. The news comes from Asus' general manager in China, Tony Yu, who also claimed that the upcoming lineup will be based on the new TR5 HEDT platform.

The revelations came in a recent video published on Chinese video-sharing site Bilibili, and was picked up by tipster @9550pro on Twitter. The video also compared Intel's new flagship Sapphire Rapids chip, the Xeon W9-3495X, with AMD's Threadripper Pro 5995WX.

According to Yu, AMD's upcoming chip will offer better competition against the Sapphire Rapids HEDT lineup, thanks to the additional cores and better efficiency than the last-gen chips.

Yu also mentioned Intel's upcoming Emerald Rapids lineup in passing but didn't reveal any new information about them. They are officially expected to launch towards the end of this year.

AMD's Threadripper 7000 series has been in the news for a few months now, with a report from last year claiming that they could be launched in September 2023 in two flavors - HEDT and Workstation.

While the former is expected to support quad-channel DDR5 memory and offer up to 64 PCIe Gen 5 lanes, the latter is said to support up to 8-channel DDR5 memory and 128 PCIe Gen 5 lanes.

The HEDT Threadripper 7000 series is expected to go up against Intel's Xeon W-2400 chips with Golden Cove cores, while the Workstation Threadripper 7000 CPUs will face off against Intel's Xeon W-3400 lineup.

The biggest upgrade for the upcoming chips, however, is expected to be the shift to the 5nm Zen 4 cores, which are already found in all of AMD's current lineups, including the Ryzen 7000 series for consumer desktops, Ryzen 7040 and 7045 chips for laptops, and EPYC Genoa 9004 for servers.

There's no more information available about AMD's Threadripper 7000 lineup as of now, including details about the exact core count or TDP, but we'll hopefully find out more sooner rather than later.