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."

AMD is developing a larger GPU based on its new "Navi" architecture to power a new high-end graphics card family, likely the Radeon RX 5800 series. The codename "Navi 12" is doing rounds on social media through familiar accounts that have high credibility with pre-launch news and rumors. The "Navi 10" silicon was designed to compete with NVIDIA's "TU106," as its "XT" and "Pro" variants outperform NVIDIA's original RTX 2060 and RTX 2070, forcing it to develop the RTX 20 Super series, by moving up specifications a notch.

Refreshing its $500 price-point was particularly costly for NVIDIA, as it was forced to tap into the 13.6 billion-transistor "TU104" silicon to carve out the RTX 2070 Super; while for the RTX 2060 Super, it had to spend 33 percent more on the memory chips. With the "Navi 12" silicon, AMD is probably looking to take a swing at NVIDIA's "TU104" silicon, which has been maxed out by the RTX 2080 Super, disrupting the company's $500-700 lineup once again, with its XT and Pro variants. There's also a remote possibility of "Navi 12" being an even bigger chip, targeting the "TU102."

GIGABYTE, the world's leading premium gaming hardware manufacturer, today announced the launch of Radeon RX 5700 XT 8G and Radeon RX 5700 8G, the latest Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards built upon the 7 nm processor technology with new RDNA architecture and the world's first GPU to support PCI Express 4.0. With RDNA gaming architecture, GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5700 XT 8G and Radeon RX 5700 8G are equipped with 2560 and 2304 stream processors respectively and both come with 8 GB GDDR6 memory to deliver superior visual fidelity, lightning-fast performance and advanced features to power the latest AAA and eSports titles. The style of the Radeon RX 5700 XT 8G graphics card is different than before. It comes with a metal exoskeleton for heat dissipation and is fused with the reimagined contour silhouette, as well as precision-machined accents. Great gaming experiences are created by bending the rules.

The RDNA gaming architecture of Radeon RX 5700 Series is designed to power the future of PC, console, mobile and cloud-based gaming for years to come. It features a new compute unit design optimized for improved efficiency and a multi-level cache hierarchy designed to provide reduced latency, higher bandwidth and lower power. Delivering up to 1.25X higher performance-per-clock and up to 1.5X higher performance-per-watt compared to the previous-generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, RDNA provides the computational horsepower to enable thrilling, immersive gaming by enhancing explosions, physics, lighting effects for fluid, high-framerate gaming experiences.

Great gaming experiences are created by bending the rules. The new SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 5700 Series GPUs, powered by RDNA architecture, are designed from the ground up for superb 1440p performance and exceptional power efficiency for high-fidelity gaming. The Radeon RX 5700 Series GPUs house AMD's 2nd generation 7nm architecture, 8GB of GDDR6 high-speed memory and PCI Express 4.0 support. These GPUs are impeccably engineered to exponentially reduce lag, increase efficiency and surround you in immersive stutter-free gameplay.

The Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU bends the rules with a revolutionary metal exoskeleton for heat dissipation, fused with the reimagined contour silhouette, and precision machined accents to perform as good as it looks.

The leading global motherboard, graphics card and mini PC manufacturer, ASRock, launches the flagship level product - Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards featuring AMD's latest Radeon RX 5700 gaming GPU and 8GB 256-bit GDDR6 memory with great gaming experiences are created by bending the rules. Take control and forge your own path with Radeon RX 5700 series and experience powerful accelerated gaming customized for you.

The Radeon RX 5700 series GPUs are powered by new RDNA architecture -- the heart of AMD's advanced 7nm technology process. RDNA features up to 40 completely redesigned "Compute Units" delivering incredible performance and up to 4x IPC improvements, new instructions better suited for visual effects such as volumetric lighting, blur effects, and depth of field, and multi-level cache hierarchy for greatly reduced latency and highly responsive gaming. The RDNA architecture enables DisplayPort 1.4 with Display Stream Compression for extreme refresh rates and resolutions on cutting edge displays for insanely immersive gameplay.

Apparently, AMD isn't celebrating its 50th anniversary in all parts of the globe, judging from recent reports regarding its AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition. Apparently, the exclusive, limited-edition graphics card will only be available for US and China customers - two of the biggest worldwide markets, for sure. This is a strange decision from AMD, since a sold unit is a sold unit; however, this may be a sign of really limited availability of the graphics card and the hardware powering it.

In a bid to bolster competitiveness of the $379 Radeon RX 5700 (non-XT) against its rival from the NVIDIA camp, the GeForce RTX 2060, AMD is leaving the memory configuration completely unchanged from the faster $449 Radeon RX 5700 XT. The RX 5700 will get 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus, with the same 14 Gbps memory speed as the RX 5700 XT. This works out to a memory bandwidth of 448 GB/s. In comparison, the $349 (launch price) RTX 2060 only has 6 GB of memory, across a 192-bit wide memory bus. With a memory speed of 14 Gbps, this setup achieves 336 GB/s.

The other area where AMD is reinforcing the RX 5700 is its raster muscle. The RX 5700 has the same 64 ROPs as the RX 5700 XT. AMD carved this SKU out by disabling two workgroup processors (four RDNA compute units), reducing the stream processor count to 2,304. This also turns down the TMU count from 160 to 144. The GPU engine clock speeds are also reduced, with 1465 MHz base, 1625 MHz "gaming clocks," and 1725 MHz boost clocks; compared to 1605/1755/1905 MHz of the RX 5700 XT. The RX 5700 has a typical board power of 180W compared to the 224W of the RX 5700 XT. Custom design cards may even feature just one 8-pin PCIe power input, while some of the premium factory-overclocked designs could use 8-pin + 6-pin configurations.

AMD "Navi 10" is a very different GPU from the "Vega 10," or indeed the "Polaris 10." The GPU sees the introduction of the new RDNA graphics architecture, which is the first big graphics architecture change on an AMD GPU in nearly a decade. AMD had in 2011 released its Graphics CoreNext (GCN) architecture, and successive generations of GPUs since then, brought generational improvements to GCN, all the way up to "Vega." At the heart of RDNA is its brand new Compute Unit (CU), which AMD redesigned to increase IPC, or single-thread performance.

Before diving deeper, it's important to confirm two key specifications of the "Navi 10" GPU. The ROP count of the silicon is 64, double that of the "Polaris 10" silicon, and same as "Vega 10." The silicon has sixteen render-backends (RBs), these are quad-pumped, which work out to an ROP count of 64. AMD also confirmed that the chip has 160 TMUs. These TMUs are redesigned to feature 64-bit bi-linear filtering. The Radeon RX 5700 XT maxes out the silicon, while the RX 5700 disables four RDNA CUs, working out to 144 TMUs. The ROP count on the RX 5700 is unchanged at 64.

It's been a very busy May-June for AMD as the company pushes out its major client-segment product lines spread across Computex 2019, and E3 2019. At Computex, the company focused on its 3rd generation Ryzen "Zen 2" desktop processors, and led its partners to show us a galaxy of new motherboards based on the AMD X570 chipset. It turns out that the company was saving a handful processor SKUs focused on gamers for E3.

The second important product launch of course is Radeon RX 5700 series, based on AMD's new "Navi 10" silicon on which its new RDNA graphics architecture debuts. With its AIB (add-in board) partners expected to be allowed to make custom-design cards, and based on what little nuggets of information AMD put out, "Navi" promises to stir up a key performance-segment price-band that's currently held by NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 2060. The AMD keynote will see the company CEO Dr. Lisa Su and her top execs take centerstage to make some big announcements. With E3 being a purely entertainment / client-segment forum, the AMD keynote promises not bore with tiresome topics such as AI, self-driving cars, etc.2:30 PM PDT: Ahead of its keynote, AMD posted a teaser video of its new RDNA graphics architecture on YouTube.

Sony has finalized the design and specification of its PlayStation 5 entertainment system. Unlike buzzwords Microsoft threw around like "8K capable" for its "Project Scarlett" console, Sony has a slightly different design goal: 4K UHD at 120 Hz, guaranteed. The most notable absentee at E3 2019, Sony is designing the PlayStation 5 to leverage the latest hardware to guarantee 120 frames per second on your 4K display. Much like "Project Scarlett," the SoC at the heart of the PlayStation 5 is a semi-custom chip co-designed by AMD and Sony.

This unnamed SoC reportedly features an 8-core/16-thread CPU based on AMD's latest "Zen 2" microarchitecture, which is a massive leap from the 8 low-power "Jaguar" cores pulling the PS4 Pro. The GPU will implement AMD's new RDNA architecture. The SoC will use GDDR6 memory, shared between the CPU and GPU. Much like "Project Scarlett," the PS5 will include an NVMe SSD as standard equipment, and the operating system will use a portion of it as virtual memory. There will also be dedicated hardware for 3D positional audio. Sony also confirmed full backwards compatibility with PS4 titles.

Microsoft at its E3 2019 keynote dropped a huge teaser of its next-generation gaming console development, codenamed "Project Scarlett." The console is expected to pack some serious hardware that powers gaming at 8K resolution (that's four times 4K, sixteen times Full HD). That's not all, it will also feature real-time ray-tracing. Microsoft's performance target for the console is to be 4 times higher than that of the Xbox One X. The company is also giving the console its first major storage sub-system performance update in years.

At its heart is a new 7 nm semi-custom SoC by AMD and a high degree of customization by Microsoft. This chip features CPU cores based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture, which provide a massive leap in CPU performance over the current Scorpio Engine SoC that uses low-power "Jaguar Enhanced" cores. At the helm of graphics is a new iGPU based on the RDNA architecture that powers AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" graphics cards. It's interesting here to note that Microsoft talks about real-time ray-tracing while we're yet to see evidence of any specialized ray-tracing hardware on "Navi." In its teaser, however, Microsoft stressed on the ray-tracing feature being "hardware-accelerated."

AMD and Samsung today announced a key strategic partnership in high performance graphics technologies for the mobile space. The agreement means that Samsung will license AMD's Radeon graphics IP in its latest RDNA iteration, no less, for integration on smartphone graphics processing. Let me stress how impressive this can be: that AMD developed a graphics architecture that can scale from a high-performance GPU down to a nimble, fast, power-sipping module for mobile graphics processing.

This is a huge strategic win for AMD, in that more and more products will be infused with their technology. As Lisa Su puts it, the Radeon user base and development ecosystem will be greatly increased with this Samsung integration - as will AMD's revenue, for sure. Perhaps we'll see a "Powered by AMD Radeon" sticker or engraving in our future Samsung smartphones, as we do with Leica partnerships, for example.)

The Wheel of Rumors turns, and assumptions come and pass, sometimes leaving unfulfilled hopes and dreams. In this case, the rumor mill, in what seems like a push from sweclockers, places Navi not as a "built from the ground-up" architecture, but rather as a highly customized iteration of GCN - iterated in the parts that it actually implements AMD's RDNA architecture, to be exact. And this makes sense from a number of reasons - it's certainly not anything to cry wolf about.

For one, AMD's GCN has been a mainstay in the graphics computing world since it was first introduced back in 2012, succeeding the company's TeraScale architecture. Game engines and assorted software have been well optimized already to take advantage of AMD's design - even with its two ISAs and assorted improvements over the years. One of the most important arguments is derived from this optimization effort: AMD's custom designs for the console market employ architectures that are GCN-based, and thus, any new architecture that would be used by both Microsoft and Sony for their next-generation consoles would have to be strictly backwards compatible.

AMD at its 2019 Computex keynote today unveiled the Radeon RX 5000 family of graphics cards that leverage its new Navi graphics architecture and 7 nm silicon fabrication process. Navi isn't just an incremental upgrade over Vega with a handful new technologies, but the biggest overhaul to AMD's GPU SIMD design since Graphics CoreNext, circa 2011. Called RDNA or Radeon DNA, the new compute unit by AMD is a clean-slate SIMD design with a 1.25X IPC uplift over Vega, an overhauled on-chip cache hierarchy, and a more streamlined graphics pipeline.

In addition, the architecture is designed to increase performance-per-Watt by 50 percent over Vega. The first part to leverage Navi is the Radeon RX 5700. AMD ran a side-by-side demo of the RX 5700 versus the GeForce RTX 2070 at Strange Brigade, where NVIDIA's $500 card was beaten. "Strange Brigade" is one game where AMD fares generally well as it is heavily optimized for asynchonous compute. Navi also ticks two big technology check-boxes, PCI-Express gen 4.0, and GDDR6 memory. AMD has planned a July availability for the RX 5700, and did not disclose pricing.