I make no effort to hide that I'm our resident AMD fanboy (#RedTeam). so I've been waiting for this one for a while. Amid hundreds of questionable leaks and speculation, we finally have solid information about some of the company's new lineup of products which launch on July 7th of this year.
Yesterday was the first day of this year's Computex, the annual trade show of computer hardware in Taipei, Taiwan. Think E3 except for us people who care way, way too much about processors. And speaking of processors, AMD stole the show with their keynote presentation where they officially unveiled the third generation of their Ryzen processors, and oh boy is there a lot in there to be excited about. So here I'll be taking the information presented by AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su and explaining what it actually means and why we should care.
When AMD initially launched their Ryzen CPUs, it was generally received as a move where the company was finally returning to compete with Intel. Intel still maintained the upper hand with performance, but the new Ryzen lineup was a perfectly viable option at a notably lower price point of entry. The second generation improved upon the first in most ways and crept ever closer to their main competitor. But now with the third generation, AMD is looking to challenge Intel not only for the mid-range but also the high-end. The new Zen 2 architecture that the line is built on is the first consumer CPU line built on a 7 nanometer node. In essence: the smaller the node, the more silicon you can fit into the chip. This has allowed AMD to achieve two very important advancements: a 15% increase in IPC (Instructions Per Clock - the number of instructions the chip can process in one clock cycle) over the previous generation, and a miraculous decrease in TDP (The measurement of heat output by the chip in watts). While a lot of AMD fans were hoping for a chip to be able to boost to 5 GHz out of the box like the high-end Intel CPUs, the IPC increase more than makes up for the max boost clocks of 4.5-4.8. So a 3rd gen Ryzen CPU at a 4.8 GHz boost performs the same number of instructions as a 2nd gen if it were running at 5.52 GHz, which is a number unobtainable at conventional cooling. The overall decrease in heat and power consumption among the new CPUs is, to me, nothing short of miraculous. Each new CPU has a dramatic decrease in thermals compared to their predecessors. The biggest note here is the price - AMD has really challenged the market with their aggressive pricing strategy. Each new CPU is roughly priced at what their previous generation counterparts were at their launch, and their new-tier flagship 3900X coming in at $499. That 12-core 3900X puts up some serious claims from the company, with AMD comparing it to Intel's rival 12-core Core i9-9920X, and claiming it outperforms it at 60W TDP lower and at seven hundred dollars cheaper. Once the chip is in the hands of trusted third party reviewers like Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus, if these claims hold true there's no doubt that it will absolutely demolish Intel's current lineup in the high-end desktop market.
So now we have an AMD which can not only challenge Intel in the mid-range but at their higher end, where previously the company hasn't been a notable threat. But Intel's bread and butter has always been their integration in datacenters and OEMs (Think Dell, HP, etc.). AMD is also coming for them in this market, announcing their new generation of their Epyc server CPUs with a lot of the same improvements they've made in the desktop market. There are no big announcements in the OEM market at this time, but the company's ever growing partnership with companies like Acer and Asus could be indicative of a future shift.
Sadly one of the most anticipated products from AMD was notably scarce from Computex - the new Radeon Navi GPUs. It was officially announced with the RX 5000 naming scheme, apparently in honour of the company's 50th anniversary this year. To be fair, this is a far better explanation of a GPU naming system than we usually get (Lookin at you, Nvidia 1600). Not much else was talked about other than a brief comparison of an RX 5700 beating an Nvidia RTX 2070 by 10% in a Strange Brigade benchmark. It should be noted here that Strange Brigade is a title optimized for AMD's Radeon architecture. The new GPUs will be based on an R(adeon)DNA Architecture, which I'm assured means something. RDNA is a complete from-the-ground-up new architecture, similar to when the company started anew with their Zen architecture with Ryzen. Not much was said about RDNA other than it's better than the company's previous generation and is designed solely for consumer gamers in mind. Once again, at this point it's best to wait for independent reviewers than to solely rely on AMD's claims. More will be announced about Navi at this year's E3 expo on June 10th, including a launch product lineup with pricing. Pricing is going to be extremely important here for the new Radeons, as it won't matter too much to most gamers how powerful the cards are if they can't challenge Nvidia on price. There's a glimmer of hope here though, as the company is comparing the new cards to Nvidia's RTX lineup however Navi will not have their version of Nvidia's expensive RTX ray tracing cores. If AMD decides to target RTX's performance-minus-ray-tracing with a price to reflect that, it could mean a lot to consumers looking for a meaningful upgrade but for prices that regular humans can afford.
The wait for E3 and more Navi details will be a long one. But in the meantime, it can definitely be said that AMD is bound to have a very good year, and Intel needs to get out of their stagnant rut and soon, because their number one competitor has more than proven that it's not willing to keep being the second-best.
