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AMD Reveals CPU, Graphics 2018-2020 Roadmap at CES

Raevenlord

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AMD at CES shed some light on its 2018 roadmap, while taking the opportunity to further shed some light on its graphics and CPU projects up to 2020. Part of their 2018 roadmap was the company's already announced, across the board price-cuts for their first generation Ryzen processors. This move aims to increase competitiveness of its CPU offerings against rival Intel - thus taking advantage of the blue giant's currently weakened position due to the exploit saga we've been covering. This move should also enable inventory clearings of first-gen Ryzen processors - soon to be supplanted by the new Zen+ 12 nm offerings, which are expected to receive a 10% boost to power efficiency from the process shrink alone, while also including some specific improvements in optimizing their performance per watt profile. These are further bound to see their market introduction in March, and are already in the process of sampling.

On the CPU side, AMD's 2018 roadmap further points towards a Threadripper and Ryzen Pro refresh in the 2H 2018, likely in the same vein as their consumer CPUs that we just talked about. On the graphics side of their 2018 roadmap, AMD focused user's attention in the introduction of premium Vega offerings in the mobile space (with HBM2 memory integration on interposer, as well), which should enable the company to compete against NVIDIA in the discrete graphics space for mobile computers. Another very interesting tidbit announced by AMD is that they would be skipping the 12 nm process for their graphics products entirely; the company announced that it will begin sampling of 7 nm Vega products to its partners, but only on the Instinct product line of machine learning accelerators. We consumers will likely have to wait a little while longer until we see some 7 nm graphics cards from AMD.





Jumping to AMD's 2020 plans, there are some very interesting developments. At its Tech Day presentation at CES, AMD has confirmed that their Zen 2 design on the 7 nm process has been already completed. The lack of Zen 2 mentions in the 2018 roadmap means this particular piece of silicon will only be launched after 2019, but with the company having already announced that the base processor design is complete - with some deeper changes than those introduced by Zen+ - means AMD will have some time now to further tune and update its final design according to the 7 nm process' characteristics. AMD has also announced that their next update to the Zen architecture, Zen 3 on the 7 nm+ process, is on-track for 2020 (likely 4Q, or beyond), which at this point, likely means the company has planned out how and where they want to go with further improvements to the Zen architecture.



On the graphics side, the 2020 roadmap includes the aforementioned cut of the 12 nm process from AMD's graphics architecture. Instead, the company will jump from the 14 nm process currently used on its Vega dies straight to the 7 nm process, beginning with the lower volume, higher margin Instinct accelerator line. Considering that these are expected to be sampled in late 2018, it's likely AMD will introduce it to market in 2019 already. The shrinkage of Vega to 7 nm is likely a way for AMD to learn the ropes of developing for that process, without also having to design a new graphics architecture at the same time, thus saving them some valuable engineering resources that can be fully deployed in the shrinking process, and then on the design/redesign of some Navi features for the 7 nm manufacturing process.



After that, the roadmap only mentions the introduction of Navi (if it follows the other 2020 roadmaps by AMD, this also points towards a 2019 introduction), and an (expected) late 2020 next-gen, 7 nm+ post-Navi graphics architecture.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site
 
So no new consumer Vega chips for a whole year... doesn't look good.
 
Also, from the looks of it, no proper low end Ryzen APU's :( Ryzen 3 looks more like a replacement for Core i3 and A12 range than for Celeron/Pentium/E2-9000e... Ryzen E3 series would be nice. Oh well, Stoney Ridge, looks like we'll be friends for a while...
 
Wow, they are banking on 7nm to save GCN. First they banked on HBM1 which failed, then HBM2 which failed even more miserably, now they bank on heavily contested fab capacity on the smallest node.

o_Oo_Oo_O

Let's just hope their CPU keeps going as it does, because they'll need it. Desperately.
 
RIP my plans for an all-AMD itx in 2018. Well, it's either an awkward combo of X470+2800x+GF2080 or less awkward 8700k+Z370+GF2080 (later upgraded to Z390+9700k).
Fuck you AMD, you have screwed up the whole plan once more.
 
After rollercoaster year that is 2017, looks like 2018 gonna be a bit mundane

I hope I'm wrong
 
[...]Well, it's either an awkward combo of X470+2800x+GF2080 or less awkward 8700k+Z370+GF2080 (later upgraded to Z390+9700k).
Fuck you AMD, you have screwed up the whole plan once more.
Why is the former considered awkward ? Just cause it isn't using an AMD GPU ? I personally wouldn't buy an AMD GPU but I don't consider AMD CPU + Nvidia GPU awkward.
 
Why is the former considered awkward ? Just cause it isn't using an AMD GPU ? I personally wouldn't buy an AMD GPU but I don't consider AMD CPU + Nvidia GPU awkward.
couz my OCD goes "WTF!?" and I don't like when my OCD goes "WTF!?"...
Hope that helps to explain.
 
Wow, they are banking on 7nm to save GCN. First they banked on HBM1 which failed, then HBM2 which failed even more miserably, now they bank on heavily contested fab capacity on the smallest node.

o_Oo_Oo_O

Let's just hope their CPU keeps going as it does, because they'll need it. Desperately.


Nvidia was so desperate they launched a new gpu just to compete... AMD is doing just fine.
 
Next time make the pictures even smaller so that NOBODY can actually read them. I think SOME people can still actually see what's in them.
 
Wow, they are banking on 7nm to save GCN. First they banked on HBM1 which failed, then HBM2 which failed even more miserably, now they bank on heavily contested fab capacity on the smallest node.

o_Oo_Oo_O

Let's just hope their CPU keeps going as it does, because they'll need it. Desperately.


Vega 56 is absolutely fine, easily beating the 1070. If you get well priced, its the reasonable choice.
 
Vega 56 is absolutely fine, easily beating the 1070. If you get well priced, its the reasonable choice.
Find me a single Vega 56 for MSRP and we'll talk. I can literally go almost anywhere and buy a 1070 right now. I can't just go buy a Vega 56 because they're literally nowhere to be found and the ones you do find have an insanely inflated price.
 
Neither 1070 nor VEGA can be found, crypto scam even depleted the GT 1030 to half the variety because people are swapping it for what ever they can put their hands on. Gaming comes to a fullstop now until crypto crashes, and then its raining cards for 1/4 price.

7nm will shrink the existing products to 1/2 the size and power, but we need atleast double the Stream Processors for a meaningful upgrade.
 
They haven't released Vega on 14nm yet :P
 
Nvidia was so desperate they launched a new gpu just to compete... AMD is doing just fine.

If you consider trailing the top end by 35-40% performance is 'doing just fine', I'm not sure what to tell you. These ain't CPUs where the competitor decides to relax for a decade because its design is superior; Nvidia has already shown that and the latest release (GV100) sits lonely at the top, with a price tag of 3K and nothing exists that can even remotely touch its complexity/die size/processing power.

Shrinking Vega won't close that gap at all, its quite worrying.
 
Find me a single Vega 56 for MSRP and we'll talk. I can literally go almost anywhere and buy a 1070 right now. I can't just go buy a Vega 56 because they're literally nowhere to be found and the ones you do find have an insanely inflated price.

Contact a shop, and make sure to pre-book that card. The problem is not just miners, but available cards. And you have to be quick.

I recently bought 4x 580's easily without any problems. Pair 'm up and they beat a 1080 with a slight higher power consumption (~ 300W). But i use 'm for mining with a lowered clock/tdp and all.
 
Nvidia was so desperate they launched a new gpu just to compete... AMD is doing just fine.

uh nvidia do that specifically to make AMD life harder and yet you say AMD is doing just fine? some people actually hoping for nvidia to milking their current situation so AMD finally have a room to breathe. if nvidia continue being more aggressive (that intel + AMD combo might give the reason for nvidia to do it) then it is start worrying for AMD. if nvidia did not break their current trend in releasing GPU sometime this year we will going to see 1070-1080 performance in sub $300 market. how do you think that will going to impact Vega 64 and 56?
 
AMD is selling to MS, Sony, Intel, Server hardware, PC hardware and try to find Vega in stock anywhere, they are sold out with orders pending, they only thing AMD isn't doing is keeping up.
 
I'm surprised that the design for Zen 2 is already complete. Zen+ on track too, quite the turnaround. Now to see if they actually make their dates :P.
 
If you consider trailing the top end by 35-40% performance is 'doing just fine', I'm not sure what to tell you.

Who really cares about the top end? They are competitive with 1070 and below and that's what really matters (to me and > 75% of the market). The real problem of AMD GPUs is availability ...
 
Who really cares about the top end? They are competitive with 1070 and below and that's what really matters (to me and > 75% of the market). The real problem of AMD GPUs is availability ...

Ehm... any company that cares to sell GPUs for longer than the next one or two years? Come on, this requires no explanation. This years' top end is next years 1070... Not pushing that boundary means that effectively you have no new product to offer, you're down to kicking old GPUs down to the cheaper tiers. This is exactly why AMD's GPU division can never turn revenue into profit and its competitor can.
 
Also, from the looks of it, no proper low end Ryzen APU's :( Ryzen 3 looks more like a replacement for Core i3 and A12 range than for Celeron/Pentium/E2-9000e... Ryzen E3 series would be nice. Oh well, Stoney Ridge, looks like we'll be friends for a while...

What do you mean? Says Desktop APU coming Q1 2018.
 
I suspect more things to come from Vega lineup between now and 2019...

I'd like to see the Ryzen+, Then on top of that what they will do with Threadripper.
 
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