AMD announced their Q2 2019 earnings yesterday and revealed a bunch of information on their upcoming 7nm products during the earnings call. The products that were highlighted include the Ryzen processor series and the Radeon RX graphics series for mainstream and high-end desktop PCs.
AMD CEO Confirms 7nm Navi High-End Radeon RX Graphics Cards For Enthusiast Desktop PCs and 4th Gen Ryzen CPUs For High-End Notebooks
During the Q/A session, the question was raised about the high-end 7nm Navi graphics cards and 7nm mobility processors to which AMD’s CEO, Dr.Lisa Su, replied that they are indeed coming.
Hans Mosesmann
“Great, And can you give us a sense if you can on 7-nanometer high-end Navi and mobile 7-nanometer CPUs, if you can? Thanks.”
Lisa Su
“Hans, you asked the good product questions, I would say they are coming. You should expect that our execution on those are on track and we have a rich 7-nanometer portfolio beyond the products that we have currently announced in the upcoming quarters.”
via Seeking Alpha
AMD has recently launched their 7nm Navi 10 GPU based Radeon RX 5700 series. Built as a next-gen replacement for their Radeon RX 500 series, the Radeon RX 5700 series offer good competition versus NVIDIA’s RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 series of graphics cards. However, NVIDIA’s top-end stack of graphics cards which include the GeForce RTX 2080, RTX 2080 Ti remain uncontested and AMD currently has no graphics card that competes with them. You could say that the Radeon VII exists but recent reports suggest that the card has gone EOL and the card has a relatively shorter supply compared to the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 SUPER which have several custom designs available in the market.
With AMD confirming that the high-end 7nm Navi is definitely coming, we can finally see AMD back in action in the high-end graphics market too. It will be interesting if the high-end Navi GPUs will be placed against the $700 US RTX 2080 or the $1200 US RTX 2080 Ti. Regardless, it’s always nice to have more options in the $500 US+ market.
Currently, there are rumors floating around that AMD’s next Navi SKU would be Navi 12. In fact, two variants are in the works, Navi 12 which is supposedly the high-end design and Navi 14 that will serve the lower-end market. It is also said that Navi 12 could feature up to 4096 SPs that would suggest a 64 CU design compared to 40 CUs on the Navi 10 GPU.
We can’t say for sure how much of this would end up being true but what we do know is that AMD Navi and RDNA architecture is here to stay. We will be getting an advanced version of RDNA known as RDNA 2 based on 7nm+ architecture sometime in 2020. There were reports prior to the Navi launch that AMD’s high-end Navi graphics cards would launch in 2020 and would support ray tracing.
That is what AMD pretty much confirmed in their own slides. The first-gen RDNA based high-end cards may launch in the second half of 2019 but we have to wait for more information to arrive. Lisa also confirmed that AMD’s fourth-generation Ryzen family for notebooks will be coming soon.
Known as Renoir, the latest family will replace the current 3rd Gen Ryzen ‘Picasso’ CPU family and will feature 7nm Zen 2 cores and 7nm GPU architecture, all on a single chip package. Both, the high-end Navi graphics cards and the mobility Ryzen CPUs are great news for their respective platforms and we should know more about them in the coming quarters. Let us know in the poll where you think high-end Navi’s performance is going to land.