SAPPHIRE Technology launches PULSE version of the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card with powerful TriXX boost Software tool that delivers up to a 15% performance improvement in popular games when the resolution is adjusted from 1920 x 1080 to 1728 x 972. Built on the groundbreaking AMD RDNA gaming architecture and 7 nm process technology, the PULSE Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card comes with 2304 stream processors, a Boost Clock of up to 1620 MHz and a Game Clock of 1560 MHz delivering ultra- responsive high fidelity AAA gaming @ up to 60 FPS in select titles. The SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 5600 XT Series are equipped with 6 GB GDDR6 of high speed memory and PCI Express 4.0 support for maximum game performance, exceptional power efficiency and outstanding value.

Focusing on what gamers' need, the PULSE Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card comes with a pivotal set of exciting features that deliver a superlative gaming experience powered by the new AMD RDNA gaming architecture. Impressive clock speeds, near silent cooling and a durable design are the trademark of the PULSE series of graphics cards.

At a Q&A session with the tech press in Las Vegas, AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su raised hopes of a high-end graphics card based on its "Navi" family of GPUs. Responding to a specific question by Gordon Ung from PC World on whether there will be a high-end competitor in the discrete graphics space, Dr Su stated that one should expect a "high-end Navi." Dr Su states: "I know those on Reddit want a high end Navi! You should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, and that it is important to have it. The discrete graphics market, especially at the high end, is very important to us. So you should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, although I don't usually comment on unannounced products."

For months now, it's been speculated that AMD has been working on a larger GPU die than "Navi 10." In 2020, AMD is expected to release the "Navi 20" familly of GPUs built on 7 nm+ (EUV) node, based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. The key design goals of RDNA2 are expected to be support for at least tier-1 variable-rate shading (VRS), and possibly hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. It's possible that "high-end Navi" belongs to this family of GPUs.

AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su at the company's 2020 International CES address announced the company's e-sports flagship graphics card, the Radeon RX 5600 XT. This card is designed to dominate the sub-$300 market-segment that's been led by NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1660-series. Based on 7 nm "Navi" silicon, the RX 5600 XT has surprisingly powerful specs: 2,304 stream processors across 36 RDNA compute units, which is the same as the RX 5700, but with some cost-cutting in the way of memory: 6 GB of GDDR6 across a 192-bit wide memory interface, and 12 Gbps memory speed. The GPU has a gaming engine clock of roughly 1500 MHz. Other key specs include 144 TMUs and 48 ROPs.

Designed with a 150 W typical board power target, the card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. The RX 5600 XT is designed to provide 1080p e-sports gaming at high refresh-rates, or 1440p gaming at reasonable graphics settings. In its presentation, AMD showed the RX 5600 XT beating the GTX 1660 Ti that leads NVIDIA's GTX 16-series. With a price of USD $279 SEP, which is on-par with that of the GTX 1660 Ti, AMD looks to bring some serious competition to the $200-300 market-segment. Available January 21, 2020.

Phil Spencer, head of the Xbox division at Microsoft, posted a picture of the semi-custom SoC at the heart of the company's upcoming "Project Scarlett" Xbox Series X game console as his Twitter avatar. The picture reveals a chip that looks visibly similar to that of "Project Scorpio" (Xbox One X). The picture was also taken from an angle that reveals the pinkish/auburn tinge of 7 nm AMD chips made at TSMC. You'll find the same tinge on chips such as "Navi 10" when viewed from an angle. The die unabashedly bears the "Project Scarlett" and "8K" markings.

Next-generation game consoles are marketing 4K 60 Hz and 8K gaming capability. They likely use a combination of dynamic resolution-scale and variable rate shading to achieve this. The "Project Scarlett" SoC is a semi-custom chip co-designed by Microsoft and AMD, and uses CPU cores based on the company's "Zen 2" microarchitecture, combined with a powerful GPU based on RDNA2, which features hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and variable-rate shading. Hardware enthusiasts on Twitter are abuzz with estimating the die-size of the SoC, with calculations pinning it around the 350 mm² mark ±10 mm², or roughly similar to that of "Project Scorpio," but one must factor in the switch to 7 nm from 16 nm significantly increasing transistor-density.

AMD's upcoming RX 5600 XT will bring about a much needed power increase over the current baseline RX 5500 series, slotting smoothly between it and the mainstream, high-performance RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. New benchmarks spotted by Videocardz place AMD's upcoming graphics card (which could feature a 6 GB VRAM with higher capacities likely to be offered as well) some 35% ahead of the RX 5500, as well as on the overall performance level of AMD's RX Vega 56. That AMD card debuted at $399 and now has performance 8% to 15% higher than NVIDIA's current GTX 1660 SUPER, exactly where AMD would want the RX 5600 XT's performance to land.

Other details come courtesy of another publication, where Igor Wallosseck over at Igor's Lab says that AMD could be looking at harvesting the Navi 10 dies that power the company's RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 by disabling one of four Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACEs). These four ACEs are found two each on one of Navi's Shader Engines (SEs), and disabling one ACE and subordinate hardware from the full Navi 10's 40 RDNA Units, 2,560 Stream Processors (SPs), 160 texture mapping units (TMUs) and 64 render output units (ROPs) would make up for an RX 5600 XT with 30 RDNA CUs, 1,920 SPs, 120 TMUs, 48 ROPs and expected 3 MB of L2 cache. AMD could be looking to position the AMD RX 5600 XT in the $249 price range, since top tier RX 5500 XT tend to go for $200.

PowerColor is readying a small form-factor friendly custom-design Radeon RX 5700 graphics card, called simply the PowerColor RX 5700 ITX. With a length of 17.5 cm, standard 11 cm height, and strictly 2-slot thickness, the card uses a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink with four 6 mm-thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes that make direct contact with the GPU at the base, ventilated by a single 80 mm fan. More interestingly, the card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector (225 W max power input for the connector + PCIe slot).

Unsurprisingly, the PowerColor RX 5700 ITX sticks to AMD-reference clock-speeds of 1465 MHz base, 1625 MHz gaming, and 1725 MHz boost, with the memory ticking at 14 Gbps (GDDR6-effective). Despite its compact cooling solution, the card does not skimp on idle-fan-off. Display outputs include two DisplayPort 1.4, and one HDMI 2.0. Based on the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon, the RX 5700 features 2,304 stream processors across 36 RDNA compute units, 144 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, holding 8 GB of memory. PowerColor didn't reveal pricing of the card, as it will formally launch it later this month.

As the world's most popular GAMING graphics card vendor, MSI is proud to introduce its full line up of graphics cards based on the new AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT series with remarkable performance. Furnished with the new AMD RDNA gaming architecture - Efficiently energetic, RDNA architecture was designed to deliver incredible performance, scalability and power efficiency. Built on the 7 nm FinFET process and delivering higher performance-per-watt compared to the previous architecture, the Radeon RX 5500 XT Series will be available as GAMING and MECH.

Hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable-rate shading will be the design focal points for AMD's next-generation RDNA2 graphics architecture. Microsoft's reveal of its Xbox Series X console attributed both features to AMD's "next generation RDNA" architecture (which logically happens to be RDNA2). The Xbox Series X uses a semi-custom SoC that features CPU cores based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture and a GPU based on RDNA2. It's highly likely that the SoC could be fabricated on TSMC's 7 nm EUV node, as the RDNA2 graphics architecture is optimized for that. This would mean an optical shrink of "Zen 2" to 7 nm EUV. Besides the SoC that powers Xbox Series X, AMD is expected to leverage 7 nm EUV for its RDNA2 discrete GPUs and CPU chiplets based on its "Zen 3" microarchitecture in 2020.

Variable-rate shading (VRS) is an API-level feature that lets GPUs conserve resources by shading certain areas of a scene at a lower rate than the other, without perceptible difference to the viewer. Microsoft developed two tiers of VRS for its DirectX 12 API, tier-1 is currently supported by NVIDIA "Turing" and Intel Gen11 architectures, while tier-2 is supported by "Turing." The current RDNA architecture doesn't support either tiers. Hardware-accelerated ray-tracing is the cornerstone of NVIDIA's "Turing" RTX 20-series graphics cards, and AMD is catching up to it. Microsoft already standardized it on the software-side with the DXR (DirectX Raytracing) API. A combination of VRS and dynamic render-resolution will be crucial for next-gen consoles to achieve playability at 4K, and to even boast of being 8K-capable.

TUL Corporation, parent of the leading and innovative AMD Graphics Card Manufacturing brand, PowerColor, announces their latest cards in their lineup, PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8 GB and PowerColor RX 5500 XT 4 GB. Powered by the the newest and most advanced 7 nm RDNA architecture with GDDR6 VRAM, the RX 5500 series features performance delivery optimized for better visuals such as volumetric lighting, motion blurring effects, depth of field, and multi-level cache hierarchy for reduced latency and a highly responsive gaming experience.

PowerColor's newest RX 5500 XT series is a perfect match for 1080p gaming, reaching 60 FPS on AAA gaming titles on high graphics settings, and over 90 FPS on the leading e-sports titles. AMD's newest lineup of features on their Radeon Graphics Drivers enhances the experience further with settings such as Radeon Image Sharpening and FidelityFX for maximum performance and insane immersive gaming experiences as well Radeon Anti-Lag for highly responsive gaming.

AMD is expected to bolster its mid-thru-performance segments of graphics cards with a few new product announcements in December. To begin with, the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which maxes out the 24 RDNA compute units on the "Navi 14" silicon, could see an early-December announcement, possibly ahead of the mid-December release of the RX 5500 to the AIB (add-in board) retail channel. Next up, is the new RX 5600 series, which enables AMD to capture $200-$300 price-points, competing with the likes of the GeForce GTX 1660 Super and GTX 1660 Ti.

There's no word on how what silicon the RX 5600 series is based on, but VideoCardz reports that the series topping RX 5600 XT has 6 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory interface. We expect that the RX 5600-series will carved out of the "Navi 10" silicon by disabling many RDNA compute units and narrowing its memory bus. Given that the RX 5500 XT has 1,536 stream processors and the RX 5700 has 2,304, AMD's wiggle room is somewhere between the two, with stream processor counts of 2,048 or 1,920 being plausible for the RX 5600 XT, and 1,792 for the RX 5600, if it exists. Availability of the RX 5600 series is slated for January 2020.Image Courtesy: PCGamesN

According to the findings of a Chiphell user called "wjm47196", AMD is supposedly going to host an event at CES 2020 to showcase its next generation of Radeon graphics cards. Having seen huge success with its first-generation "RDNA" GPUs, AMD is expected to showcase improved lineup utilizing new and improved RDNA 2 graphics card architecture.

Judging by the previous information, second generation of RDNA graphics cards will get much-needed features like ray tracing, to remain competitive with existing offers from NVIDIA and soon Intel. Supposed to be built using the 7 nm+ manufacturing process, the new GPU architecture will get around 10-15% performance improvement due to the new manufacturing process alone, with possibly higher numbers if there are changes to the GPU core.

In September, Sapphire unveiled its most powerful graphics card to date - the SAPPHIRE NITRO+ RX 5700 XT - which delivers amazing 4K and 1440p performance, but also features very advanced RGB customization options. We even created a set of SAPPHIRE ARGB Fans specifically for this card (sold separately), so you could illuminate your system even more. Since then, many of you have asked if we could include the ARGB Fans with the card itself. oday we are ready and excited to announce the SAPPHIRE NITRO+ RX 5700 XT SPECIAL EDITION! Not only does it include the SAPPHIRE ARGB Fans out of the box, but we've increased the card's performance even more.

Marketing material of AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 5500 mid-range graphics cards leaked to the web, providing insights to the product's positioning in AMD's stack. The October 2019 dated document lists out the card's specification, performance relative to a competing NVIDIA product, and a provides a general guidance on what experience to expect form it. To begin with, the RX 5500 desktop graphics card is based on the 7 nm "Navi 14" silicon, and is configured with 22 RDNA compute units, amounting to 1,408 stream processors. The chip features a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus, which is paired with either 4 GB or 8 GB of memory running at 14 Gbps data-rate, yielding 224 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Its GPU clocks are listed as 1670 MHz "gaming," and 1845 MHz boost. The company didn't mention nominal clocks. The typical board power is rated at 110 W, and a single 8-pin PCIe power input is deployed on the reference-design board.

The second slide is where things get very interesting. AMD tabled its product stack, and the RX 570, RX 580, and RX 590 are missing, even as the RX 560 isn't. This is probably a sign of AMD phasing out the Polaris-based 1080p cards in the very near future, and replacing them with the RX 5500, and possibly a better endowed "RX 5500 XT," if rumors of the "Navi 14" featuring more CUs are to be believed. What is surprising about this whole presentation though is that only the "RX 5500" is listed, with the "XT" nowhere in sight. Let's hope the XT version gets released further down the road. In the product stack, the RX 5500 is interestingly still being compared to the GeForce GTX 1650, with no mention of the GTX 1660. This document was probably made when the GTX 1660 Super hadn't launched. A different slide provides some guidance on what kind of experiences to expect from the various cards, rated N/A, good, better, or excellent. According to it, the RX 5500 should provide "excellent" AAA gaming at 1080p, fairly smooth gaming at high settings (graded "better"), "excellent" e-Sports gaming, and "better" 1440p gaming. The card is also "excellent" at all non-gaming graphics, such as watching 4K video, photo/video creator work, game streaming at any resolution, and general desktop use.

A collaborative effort by several Redditors discovered that AMD could carve as many as five Radeon RX 5000-series SKUs based on its upcoming 7 nm "Navi 14" GPU. They poured through thousands of lines of code in AMD's open-source GPU driver files. Among these are two mobile GPUs, and three desktop. The "Navi 14" silicon allegedly features up to 24 RDNA compute units making up 1,536 stream processors; and possibly a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface. The highest trim based on this silicon is the "Navi 14 XTX" variant, which goes by the commercial name Radeon RX 5500 XT. While it remains to be seen if it maxes out all 24 CUs present on the silicon, it certainly has the highest engine gaming clocks at 1717 MHz.

Next up is the Radeon RX 5500 ("Navi 14 XT"). This SKU is popularized in AMD's October 2019 product announcements. It is known to feature 22 compute units working out to 1,408 stream processors, and up to 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across the chip's 128-bit wide memory interface. Its gaming clocks are rated at 1670 MHz. The other popularized SKU is the Radeon RX 5500M ("Navi 14 XTM"). With the same core-config as the RX 5500, this SKU has slightly lesser clock-speeds contributing to a more aggressive power-management. Its gaming clocks are rated at 1448 MHz. It turns out that AMD is interested in carving out a whole different segment of GPUs based on "Navi 14," the Radeon RX 5300 series.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the third quarter of 2019 of $1.80 billion, operating income of $186 million, net income of $120 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.11. On a non-GAAP(*) basis, operating income was $240 million, net income was $219 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.18.

"Our first full quarter of 7 nm Ryzen, Radeon and EPYC processor sales drove our highest quarterly revenue since 2005, our highest quarterly gross margin since 2012 and a significant increase in net income year-over-year," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "I am extremely pleased with our progress as we have the strongest product portfolio in our history, significant customer momentum and a leadership product roadmap for 2020 and beyond."

These could very well be the first pictures of a custom-design Radeon RX 5500 graphics card. Pictures of the purported XFX Radeon RX 5500 THICC II made it to the web courtesy VideoCardz. It's very likely that this is the RX 5500 looking at its power-connectivity, which includes just a single 8-pin PCIe input. An RX 5700-series product would at least feature an 8+6-pin input design. The display I/O is also peculiar, with not one but two dual-link DVI-D connectors (no analog pins on either), and one each of DisplayPort and HDMI. The card has the same design language as its THICC series siblings from the RX 5700-series.

The cooling solution uses two shrouds (the front shroud and the back-plate) that meet in the middle in symmetry. Two fans ventilate an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that features two or three 8 mm-thick copper heat pipes. The cooler is longer than the card itself. Based on the 7 nm "Navi 11" silicon, the Radeon RX 5500 features 22 RDNA compute units working out to 1,408 stream processors, boost frequencies of up to 1848 MHz, and up to 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface.

Sony's next-generation PlayStation 5 could land under many Christmas trees...in the year 2020, as the company plans a Holiday 2020 launch for the 4K-ready, 8K-capable entertainment system that has a semi-custom chip many times more powerful than the current generation, to support its lofty design goals. By late-2020, Sony calculates that some form of ray-tracing could be a must-have for gaming, and is working with its chip designer AMD to add just that - hardware-acceleration for ray-tracing, and not just something that's pre-baked or emulated over GPGPU.

Mark Cerny, a system architect at Sony's US headquarters, in an interview with Wired, got into the specifics of the hardware driving the company's big platform launch for the turn of the decade. "There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware," he said, adding "which I believe is the statement that people were looking for." Besides raw processing power increases, Sony will focus on getting the memory and storage subsystems right. Both are interdependent, and with fast NAND flash-based storage, Sony can rework memory-management to free up more processing resources. AMD has been rather tight-lipped about ray-tracing on its Radeon GPUs. CEO Lisa Su has been dismissive about the prominence of the tech saying "it's one of the many technologies these days." The company's mid-2019 launch of the "Navi" family of GPUs sees the company skip ray-tracing hardware. The semi-custom chip's GPU at the heart of PlayStation 5 was last reported to be based on the same RDNA architecture.

Today, AMD announced the Radeon RX 5500 series graphics products, harnessing groundbreaking RDNA gaming architecture to deliver the ultimate in high-performance, high-fidelity 1080p gaming. The AMD Radeon RX 5500 series includes the Radeon RX 5500 graphics card that will be available in desktop PCs from leading manufacturers and graphics cards from board partners, as well as the Radeon RX 5500M GPU for notebook PCs. Top system providers worldwide are embracing the new products, with HP and Lenovo planning to offer Radeon RX 5500 graphics cards in their high performance desktop gaming PCs beginning this November, and Acer planning to offer systems with the cards beginning this December. In addition, later this month MSI is expected to launch the world's first gaming notebook powered by AMD Ryzen processors and Radeon RX 5500M GPUs.

"Based on feedback and insights from global gaming communities, gamers rank graphics as the most critical component for speed and performance," said Johnson Jia, senior vice president and general manager, Consumer Business of Intelligent Devices Group, Lenovo. "That's why the Lenovo Legion T730 and T530 gaming towers and the IdeaCentre T540 Gaming desktop pack in AMD's latest Radeon RX graphics - satisfying players' need for high-fidelity visuals and lightning-fast frame-rates to fully immerse into their gameplay." "MSI Alpha 15 is a new chapter for us, and we're excited to partner with AMD to combine the latest 7 nm technology found in the Radeon RX 5500M GPU and MSI's gaming DNA for our gamers," said Charles Chiang, CEO of MSI.

It turns out that the Radeon RX 5500 is arriving a lot sooner than expected, with VideoCardz reporting an October 7th product launch for the card. It's also being reported that the SKU will launch as the Radeon RX 5500 XT, with board partner GIGABYTE being ready with half a dozen custom-design cards, all of which with 8 GB of memory. In a separate report, VideoCardz also confirmed that the RX 5500 series will be based on the latest "Navi" family of GPUs that use the company's latest RDNA architecture, and will be built on the 7 nm silicon fabrication process. What's more, the RX 5500 will reportedly use 8 GB of modern GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory bus. A WCCFTech report predicts the RX 5500 (XT) will feature 22 RDNA compute units, which works out to 1,408 stream processors.

With these specs, we can see where AMD is going with the RX 5500 (XT). The company wants a viable successor to the Radeon RX 580 or even the RX 590, which it can sell around the $200-250 price-range, competing with a spectrum of NVIDIA GPUs, including the GeForce GTX 1650 and the GTX 1660. The card would target 1080p AAA gaming with high-thru-ultra settings, and 1080p eSports gaming at high refresh-rates. NVIDIA is already preparing a response to the RX 5500 in the form of the GTX 1650 Super and the GTX 1660 Super, which come with beefed up specs.

AMD is preparing lower-end variants of its NAVI GPUs based on new RDNA graphics card architecture, which will replace all the existing cards based on aging GCN architecture. Today, AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 5500, as it is called, got benchmarked in GFXBench - a cross-platform benchmark which features various kinds of test for Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android.

The benchmark was run on Windows OS using OpenGL API. It only ran the "Manhattan" high-level test, which yielded a result of 5430 frames in total or about 87.6 frames per second. When compared to something like RX 5700 XT, which scored 8905 frames in total and 143.6 FPS, RX 5500 clearly seems positioned at the lower end of NAVI GPU stack. Despite the lack of details, we can expect this card to compete against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1660/1660 Ti GPUs where AMD has no competing offer so far.

TSMC is on the vanguard of chipset fabrication technology at this exact point in time - its 7 nm technology is the leading-edge of all large volume processes, and is being tapped by a number of companies for 7 nm silicon. One of its most relevant clients for our purposes, of course, is AMD - the company now enjoys a fabrication process lead over arch-rival Intel much due to its strategy of fabrication spin-off and becoming a fabless designer of chips. AMD's current product stack has made waves in the market by taking advantage of 7 nm's benefits, but it seems this may actually become a slight problem in the not so distant future.

TSMC has announced a threefold increase in its delivery lead times for 7 nm orders, from two months to nearly six months, which means that orders will now have to wait three times longer to be fulfilled than they once did. This means that current channel supplies and orders made after the decision from TSMC will take longer to materialize in actual silicon, which may lead to availability slumps should demand increase or maintain. AMD has its entire modern product stack built under the 7 nm process, so this could potentially affect both CPUs and GPUs from the company - and let's not forget AMD's Zen 3 and next-gen RDNA GPUs which are all being designed for the 7 nm+ process node. TSMC is expected to set aside further budget to expand capacity of its most advanced nodes, whilst accelerating investment on their N7+, N6, N5, and N3 nodes.

The leading global motherboard, graphics card and mini PC manufacturer, ASRock, announces their new Taichi X series graphics cards - the Radeon RX 5700 XT Taichi X 8G OC+, which is ASRock's first Taichi X series graphics card featuring AMD's latest Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU and 8 GB 256-bit GDDR6 memory, brings exceptional computing power and an immersive experience nested within an elegant design.

In Chinese culture, "Taichi" represents the philosophical state of yin and yang. ASRock's Taichi graphics cards are designed for tech geeks and power users who care about products' design and quality, and comes with premium features that can fulfill every geek's dream and fulfill power user's important task. To carry forward Taichi's spirit, which symbolizes the balance between elegance and stability; Taichi graphics cards are formed with two main elements in mind - "design" and "quality".

AMD updated its technology roadmaps to reflect a 2020 launch window for its upcoming CPU and graphics architectures, "Zen 3" and RDNA2. The two will be based on 7 nm+ , which is AMD-speak for the 7 nanometer EUV silicon fabrication process at TSMC, that promises a significant 20 percent increase in transistor-densities, giving AMD high transistor budgets and more clock-speed headroom. The roadmap slides however hint that unlike the "Zen 2" and RDNA simultaneous launch on 7th July 2019, the next-generation launches may not be simultaneous.

The slide for CPU microarchitecture states that the design phase of "Zen 3" is complete, and that the microarchitecture team has already moved on to develop "Zen 4." This means AMD is now developing products that implement "Zen 3." On the other hand, RDNA2 is still in design phase. The crude x-axis on both slides that denotes year of expected shipping, too appears to suggest that "Zen 3" based products will precede RDNA2 based ones. "Zen 3" will be AMD's first response to Intel's "Comet Lake-S" or even "Ice Lake-S," if the latter comes to fruition before Computex 2020. In the run up to RDNA2, AMD will scale up RDNA a notch larger with the "Navi 12" silicon to compete with graphics cards based on NVIDIA's "TU104" silicon. "Zen 2" will receive product stack additions in the form of a new 16-core Ryzen 9-series chip later this month, and the 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper family.

Gears 5, the next upcoming installment in the Gears of War series of video games, is launching this September 10th. In anticipation, developer The Coalition has announced the games' close partnership development with AMD, optimizing it for the company's cadre of GPU and CPU solutions. The game will make extensive use of Asynchronous Compute - one of AMD's most relevant technologies in gaining the upper hand against NVIDIA on performance terms. According to the developer, post-processing effects are being run exclusively on Asynchronous Compute, which means that the games' rendering is being run as close to a clockwork as possible. FidelityFX also makes an appearance again, as one of the latest AMD technologies for improving visual fidelity and sharpness. Multithreaded Command Buffering is the technical implementation for a system that improves AMD's Ryzen CPUs' processing of the game, specifically geared towards taking advantage of that CPU architecture's strong points.

The game seems to be a pretty scalable affair, with minimum requirements making do with just 2 GB of VRAM and an AMD RX 560 or NVIDIA GTX 1050. The ideal system requirements, however, call for a much beefier setup, with an AMD Radeon VII or NVIDIA RTX 2080 being called for, including 16 GB of system memory and a whopping 100 GB+ install footprint - preferably on an SSD. The game, like Gears of War 4, has been developed with the PC market in mind - there are more than 35 different graphical options for users to tweak. Here's hoping the games' writing is as much a technical achievement as its engine development seems to be.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2019 of $1.53 billion, operating income of $59 million, net income of $35 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.03. On a non-GAAP basis, operating income was $111 million, net income was $92 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.08.

"I am pleased with our financial performance and execution in the quarter as we ramped production of three leadership 7nm product families," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "We have reached a significant inflection point for the company as our new Ryzen, Radeon and EPYC processors form the most competitive product portfolio in our history and are well positioned to drive significant growth in the second half of the year."