We're only three days away from AMD's big "New Horizon" preview event for Zen in Austin Texas and we're already getting a taste of one of AMD's high-endZen chips. The CPU in question is a sixteen core, 32 thread "Naples" part. Which has been pictured in its natural habitat, a server enclosure.

Naples is AMD's next generation Zen based top of the line enterprise chip that the company hopes to take-onIntelwith next year, in the highlylucrative server market. It's by far the largest and most powerful CPU system-on-a-chip that the company has ever developed.

This particular sixteen core chip is only one of several variants, the highest end of which comes in a 32 core, 64 thread configuration. Which is the largest core and thread count in x86 CPUhistory. Easily outnumbering the 24 cores of Intel's largest server processor to date, the E7-8890 v4.

A Closer Look At AMD's Next Big Server Chip, Naples

AMD Naples Dual Socket, 64 Core,Prototype Board( Via Anandtech.com )

The company has been shipping engineering samples of its upcoming enterprise platform built around Naples over the past several months. We got our first sneak peak atitearlier this year when AMD showcased its dual socket prototype board equipped with two 32 core Naples CPUs. Housing a total of 64 cores and 128 threads makes this little box effectively a mini super-computer.

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The leaked photos above showcase a similar but much more compact configuration. Featuring two Zen SOCs inside an actively cooled server tray that's also equipped with two Radeon Pro graphics accelerators. The cooling solution is the standard four fan fair. Pushing cool air through components inside the enclosure and out the back. Cooling the Naples SOCs directly are two low profile high density aluminum fin heatsinks.

If we zoom in on the Naples package one thing becomes instantly obvious, this chip is big. It is significantly larger than the standard desktop Summit Ridge package.It also comes in an LGA - Land Grid Array - configuration, where the pins are in the socket and the contacts are on the bottom of the chip. This is, while quite different from the PGA - Pin Grid Array - solutionwe've come accustomed to with AMD's desktop chips is actually very similar to AMD's previous server chips. All of which have come in LGA packages since the 2006 introduction ofSocket F and theoriginal Opteron server processors.

Backside of AMD AM4 Zen Summit Ridge & Bristol Ridge Processorsviahwsw

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