AMD just announced its Q2 2019 earnings, with a positive outlook in the CPU market courtesy of Ryzen 3000 but luke-warm results in the GPU space. The Ryzen 3000 processors kept the pressure on Intel while the Navi GPUs weren’t quite able to stem the tide of the RTX cards.
However, that’s not the interesting bit. What’s curious though is that AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su today hinted at the possibility of a higher-end Navi card (Radeon RX 5800?) sooner than expected. One of the journalists asked if the company CEO could “give us a sense on 7nm high-end Navi and mobile 7nm CPUs.” Dr. Su responded by saying that: Advertisement
I would say they are coming. You should expect that our execution on those are on track and we have a rich 7nm portfolio beyond the products that we have currently announced in the upcoming quarters.
This may very well refer to the Navi 12 rumors about a 64 Compute Unit graphics card featuring as many as 4096 Stream Processors, expected to perform in the same range as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. As already mentioned, if this pans out, it’ll be a much–needed competitor to the Turing flagship, and the one thing we can expect for sure is better pricing.
The recently launched Radeon RX 5700 cards compete with the midrange and upper-range RTX cards, the 2060 and the 2070 Super, and the best part is that they are significantly cheaper. We can expect the same from an RTX 2080 Ti rival. It’s been a while since AMD competed in the enthusiast graphics card space. The last red GPU to exchange blows with the Ti flagship was the Radeon R9 FuryX packing 4GB of HBM memory. However, it was severely limited at 4K courtesy of the smaller memory buffer and often fell short of the Maxwell-based GTX 980 Ti. Since then, AMD has avoided that part of the GPU market. And unsurprisingly, the prices of the NVIDIA flagships has almost doubled in the last 4-5 years.
The other noteworthy take away from that comment is the coming of the 7nm Zen 2 based mobile Ryzen processors. At present, the Picasso APUs compete with Intel’s Coffee Lake parts but they aren’t quite as power-efficient and don’t perform that well in gaming. The newer chips will most certainly be a major upgrade over the existing parts with much better TDPs and improved single-threaded performance. That should drop the prices of the gaming laptops even further, and given that 10nm Ice Lake-U powered laptops will be limited and pricier than the existing Whiskey Lake devices, AMD’s products will provide a much-needed alternative.
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