Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today debuted two new chips, one for the enterprise and another targeting consumers, that will each one-up the competition in their respective markets.

The company made the announcements at the Computex computing trade conference in Taipei. The event had earlier seen the introduction of new chips from Nvidia Corp. and Intel Corp., which will no doubt keep an eye on AMD’s latest entries into the market.

The first product the company previewed is an enterprise-grade graphics processing unit touted as the first in the industry to feature a 7-nanometer transistor architecture. It represents a major improvement over AMD’s previous, 14-nanometer GPU.

The smaller the circuits on a chip are, the more of them can be incorporated into the die, which in turn increases performance. Smaller transistors also have the added benefit of requiring less electricity. All this is reflected clearly in the limited information that AMD has shared about the GPU.

The company said that the chip is 35 percent faster than its predecessor and up to two times more power efficient. Plus, it comes with a hefty 32 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory. The GPU will offer a potentially compelling alternative to Nvidia’s market-leading graphics accelerators for enterprises working on artificial intelligence projects.

According to AMD, the first server and workstation editions of the GPU will hit the market in the second quarter. A consumer version aimed at video game enthusiasts is set to follow suit sometime next year.

The other chip series AMD unveiled today is the Threadripper 2, the second generation of its central processing units for personal computers. The company said that the highest-end model will offer as many as 32 processing cores. This breaks the previous industry record, which was set only yesterday when Intel introduced a 28-core PC processor during its own Computex demonstration.

Yet while the chip certainly looks impressive on paper, it remains to be how the Threadripper 2’s architectural advantage will translate into real-world performance. AMD didn’t divulge the CPU series’ clock speeds, whereas Intel has specified that its yet-unnamed 28-core processor is capable of running at up to 5 gigahertz.

But Moorhead said it looks promising. “ThreadRipper is very competitive and in heavily multithreaded environments, should outperform Intel’s 28-core part,” he said. “To boot, the AMD part operates on air cooling and the Intel part requires chilled water cooling.”

The Threadripper 2 is set to become generally available in the third quarter.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo of AMD CEO Lisa Su: AMD