AMD Ryzen Threadripper was a spare-time skunkworks project

An interview with a couple of AMD bigwigs reveals the surprising story of how the Ryzen Threadripper CPU was created. It appears Threadripper was not conceived by AMD's management but was more of a skunkworks project that was created by a small group of AMD workers in their spare time. Work on Threadripper started sometime after the Zen architecture was first revealed in 2014 and the small team worked about a year on the concept before they presented it to management. Without this dedicated group of AMD employees, there would probably not have been a consumer version of the EPYC server processor:

James Prior:
Myself and a few others were in a very cross functional team that get together for various different projects and as we got the first hints of what the Zen core performance and efficiency were like and started looking at the internal roadmap, which is a constantly changing thing and noticed a gap between Ryzen and EPYC. Certainly, something that stood above Ryzen with more memory bandwidth, cores, PCI-E lanes. To get to this product, which sounded great to us as enthusiasts, we found we’d only have to change a few details. So we put together this skunkworks team where we had platform architects, people that deal with core design, business unit, marketing team, to work out how to use what’s already here and to go to the boss – Jim Anderson and say we’d like to do this. This was all happening in 2015.

You can learn more about Threadripper's development at Forbes.