According to a report from Tweaktown, AMD will be launching its much anticipated Radeon Navi graphics cards at this year’s E3. This puts the launch of Navi a few weeks after Computex in mid-June. If you have been following AMD’s upcoming release schedule, then you’ll know that the 7nm Zen2 based Ryzen 3000 CPUs are slated for launch at a pre-Computex press conference at the end of next month. There has been a bit of uncertainty as far as the release of the next Radeon products is concerned but we do know that they’ll be coming in the second or third quarter of 2019.
Earlier this year, AMD came up with the world’s first 7nm GPU, the Radeon VII which launched on 7th Feb to coincide with the naming and the manufacturing process. It’s very likely that the Navi lineup will land on a similar date, possibly 7th July (7/07) to further capitalize on this market strategy. The Ryzen 3000 processors are set to shake things up in the CPU market, but the same can’t be said for Navi. NVIDIA is in a much more comfortable compared to Intel. While the higher end RTX 20 series lineup drew a lot of flak, it was followed up by the GTX 16 Turing cards which are very competitive with AMD’s mid-range offerings.
This E3 is going to be different for two reasons. Firstly, Sony will be absent from the event, and Microsoft will be looking to take full advantage of that with a possible reveal of its next-gen Xbox consoles. Secondly, both the upcoming gaming platforms from Sony as well as MS are said to be based on AMD’s 7nm Zen2 and Navi combo, so an E3 reveal of Navi will give us a taste of what to expect.
A lot will change in the next year or so. The Ryzen 3000 CPUs will either shake up the market once again, or they’ll continue AMD’s multi-core onslaught against Intel. Either way, it’s a win-win for team red. Secondly, the latter’s 10nm Ice lake processors are finally expected to become a reality after several years of delays and the continued shortage of 14nm chips.
Last but not the least, Intel has put together a formidable team to build its Xe GPUs, comprising of industry veterans from both AMD and NVIDIA. These include the likes of ex-NVIDIA technical marketing lead, Tom Petersen, ex-Radeon head Raja Koduri and former Sr. Director of Global Marketing at AMD, Chris Hook, and a bunch of other well-known names. This all points to the fact that Intel means business and with all the capital the company has, it won’t be too hard to gain a foothold in the discrete GPU space.
Anyway, Zen2, Navi and then Intel’s Xe followed by NVIDIA Ampere, all of them will be based on the 7nm node and should be a notable improvement over their predecessors. It’s going to get real crowded soon, but hey that’s a good thing. Let us know your opinions in the comment section below.
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