Wednesday, January 9th 2019
AMD's CES 2019 Keynote - Stream & Live Blog
CPUs or GPUs? Ryzen 3000 series up to 16 cores or keeping their eight? Support for raytracing? Navi or die-shrunk Vega for consumer graphics? The questions around AMD's plans for 2019 are still very much in the open, but AMD's Lisa Su's impending livestream should field the answers to many of these questions, so be sure to watch the full livestream, happening in just a moment.You can find the live stream here, at YouTube.
18:33 UTC: Looking forward, Lisa mentioned a few technology names without giving additional details: "... when you're talking about future cores, Zen 2, Zen 3, Zen 4, Zen 5, Navi, we're putting all of these architectures together, in new ways".
18:20 UTC: New Ryzen 3rd generation processors have been teased. The upcoming processors are based on Zen 2, using 7 nanometer technology. AMD showed a live demo of Forza Horizon 4, using Ryzen third generation, paired with Radeon Vega VII, which is running "consistently over 100 FPS at highest details at 1080p resolution". A second demo, using Cinebench, pitted an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 3rd generation processor against the Intel Core i9-9900K. The Ryzen CPU was "not final frequency, an early sample". Ryzen achieved a score of 2057 using 135 W, while Intel achieved a score of 2040 using 180 W.. things are looking good for Ryzen 3rd generation indeed. Lisa also confirmed that next-gen Ryzen will support PCI-Express 4.0, which doubles the bandwidth per lane over PCI-Express 3.0. Ryzen third generation will run on the same AM4 infrastructure as current Ryzen; all existing users of Ryzen can simply upgrade to the new processors, when they launch in the middle of 2019 (we think Computex).Ryzen third generation uses a chiplet design. The smaller die on the right contains 8-cores/16-threads using 7 nanometer technology. The larger die on the left is the IO die, which consists of things like the memory controller and PCI-Express connectivity, to shuffle data between the CPU core die and the rest of the system.18:10 UTC: Shifting gears now to talk about processors. First up is EPYC 2nd generation, built using on the 7 nanometer process. A scientific demo was presented showing a single EPYC processor, beating two Intel Xeon 8180 processors (28 core/56 thread), by a significant amount. Regarding availability, Lisa said that EPYC second generation "is absolutely on track and we will start shipping in the middle of 2019".18:05 UTC: Lisa announced a partnership with Google, to deliver AAA game streaming to end-users. A demo of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey was shown running at 1080p with 60 FPS. The servers are located in Google's cloud and are powered by AMD Radeon GPUs.17:55 UTC: Ubisoft just confirmed that "at launch, the Division 2 will support the full set of advanced Radeon technology features" (Rapid Packed Math, Async Compute and Shader Intrinsics). AMD is bundling the game with all Radeon VII cards, and select Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 processors for free.
17:45 UTC: AMD Radeon VII (pronounced "Radeon Seven") has been unveiled - the next gaming GPU from AMD. It's the world's first 7 nm gaming GPU, based on the Vega 10 shrink to the 7 nm node; this is not Navi. The card has "only" 60 CUs, which is a few less than Vega 64, but to make up for that, it is clocked higher. Thanks to 7 nanometer technology, power draw is lower, which helps keep temperatures and noise levels down, too. Gaming performance is up 35-42% in games, thanks to a massive 1.8 GHz clock speed. This should make the card competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 as shown by a slide during the event. With 16 GB of HBM2 memory, the card features an insane amount of memory for just gaming, which is probably why AMD is marketing the card at "creators" too, not unlike what NVIDIA does with Titan. The HBM2 memory is connected to the GPU using a 4096-bit memory interface.
Radeon VII releases on February 7th at a price of $699. For a limited time the card will be bundled with Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 2 and The Division 2.17:43 UTC: Lisa is talking about AMD's new Radeon software Adrenalin 2019, which we covered in great detail here.17:40 UTC: Phil Spencer, Head of Gaming, Microsoft is on stage and praises the relationship between AMD and Microsoft, and confirms that the companies will work on future projects together, which probably means next-gen Xbox consoles.17:30 UTC: AMD is announcing that their Radeon Software will now be a first class citizen for Ryzen Mobile systems, which probably means that Ryzen Desktop APUs will also receive this kind of driver support. In the past this was a big issue for many users. The new drivers will be available directly from AMD's website, starting February 2019.
18:33 UTC: Looking forward, Lisa mentioned a few technology names without giving additional details: "... when you're talking about future cores, Zen 2, Zen 3, Zen 4, Zen 5, Navi, we're putting all of these architectures together, in new ways".
18:20 UTC: New Ryzen 3rd generation processors have been teased. The upcoming processors are based on Zen 2, using 7 nanometer technology. AMD showed a live demo of Forza Horizon 4, using Ryzen third generation, paired with Radeon Vega VII, which is running "consistently over 100 FPS at highest details at 1080p resolution". A second demo, using Cinebench, pitted an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 3rd generation processor against the Intel Core i9-9900K. The Ryzen CPU was "not final frequency, an early sample". Ryzen achieved a score of 2057 using 135 W, while Intel achieved a score of 2040 using 180 W.. things are looking good for Ryzen 3rd generation indeed. Lisa also confirmed that next-gen Ryzen will support PCI-Express 4.0, which doubles the bandwidth per lane over PCI-Express 3.0. Ryzen third generation will run on the same AM4 infrastructure as current Ryzen; all existing users of Ryzen can simply upgrade to the new processors, when they launch in the middle of 2019 (we think Computex).Ryzen third generation uses a chiplet design. The smaller die on the right contains 8-cores/16-threads using 7 nanometer technology. The larger die on the left is the IO die, which consists of things like the memory controller and PCI-Express connectivity, to shuffle data between the CPU core die and the rest of the system.18:10 UTC: Shifting gears now to talk about processors. First up is EPYC 2nd generation, built using on the 7 nanometer process. A scientific demo was presented showing a single EPYC processor, beating two Intel Xeon 8180 processors (28 core/56 thread), by a significant amount. Regarding availability, Lisa said that EPYC second generation "is absolutely on track and we will start shipping in the middle of 2019".18:05 UTC: Lisa announced a partnership with Google, to deliver AAA game streaming to end-users. A demo of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey was shown running at 1080p with 60 FPS. The servers are located in Google's cloud and are powered by AMD Radeon GPUs.17:55 UTC: Ubisoft just confirmed that "at launch, the Division 2 will support the full set of advanced Radeon technology features" (Rapid Packed Math, Async Compute and Shader Intrinsics). AMD is bundling the game with all Radeon VII cards, and select Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 processors for free.
17:45 UTC: AMD Radeon VII (pronounced "Radeon Seven") has been unveiled - the next gaming GPU from AMD. It's the world's first 7 nm gaming GPU, based on the Vega 10 shrink to the 7 nm node; this is not Navi. The card has "only" 60 CUs, which is a few less than Vega 64, but to make up for that, it is clocked higher. Thanks to 7 nanometer technology, power draw is lower, which helps keep temperatures and noise levels down, too. Gaming performance is up 35-42% in games, thanks to a massive 1.8 GHz clock speed. This should make the card competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 as shown by a slide during the event. With 16 GB of HBM2 memory, the card features an insane amount of memory for just gaming, which is probably why AMD is marketing the card at "creators" too, not unlike what NVIDIA does with Titan. The HBM2 memory is connected to the GPU using a 4096-bit memory interface.
Radeon VII releases on February 7th at a price of $699. For a limited time the card will be bundled with Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 2 and The Division 2.17:43 UTC: Lisa is talking about AMD's new Radeon software Adrenalin 2019, which we covered in great detail here.17:40 UTC: Phil Spencer, Head of Gaming, Microsoft is on stage and praises the relationship between AMD and Microsoft, and confirms that the companies will work on future projects together, which probably means next-gen Xbox consoles.17:30 UTC: AMD is announcing that their Radeon Software will now be a first class citizen for Ryzen Mobile systems, which probably means that Ryzen Desktop APUs will also receive this kind of driver support. In the past this was a big issue for many users. The new drivers will be available directly from AMD's website, starting February 2019.