Version 2.06 of the widely used free CPU-Z program, recently released by CPUID, offers changes to facilitate reporting of a range of modern or obscure CPU and GPU types. The “Alder Lake-N” CPU from Intel, the “Dragon Range” mobile Zen 4 processors from AMD, the “KH-40000” and “KX-6000G” processors from Zhoaxin, and of course the RTX 4060 Ti and RX 7600 from NVIDIA. The item that is tucked away at the very bottom of the list, “Preliminary support for AMD Storm Peak platform,” is the most intriguing of all. “Storm Peak” is AMD’s yet-to-be-announced Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series, which will incorporate “Zen 4” and perhaps heat up competition in the HEDT market. While “Storm Peak” is anticipated to make an official announcement sometime in Q3 2023, no particular details or information on SKUs have yet been made public. The platform may soon be ready for the market, and the mention on CPU-Z supports that. It’s also possible that the staff at CPUID have been seeded samples or specifications to prepare with. It has been speculated that Threadripper 7000 will be available on yet another new socket, TR5, and that it will come in both HEDT and workstation versions.

With the launch of their Sapphire Rapids Xeon W series of processors back in February, Intel created competition in the HEDT market for the first time in almost 4 years. From top to bottom, Xeon W’s unlocked SKUs take on AMD’s Threadripper 5000 series; prices range from $5,889 USD for the 56-core Xeon w9-3495X to less than $1,000 USD for the 12-core Xeon w5-2455X. To enable system integrators to sell the new platform as workstations to the prosumer market, which typically has little interest in overclocking, Intel also inserted certain lower cost locked SKUs. Since Threadripper is now directly competing with Intel products once more, it was anticipated that AMD would quickly prepare a counterpunch with their newest and greatest technology.