Unlike NVIDIA and Intel, AMD had a rather successful 2018 with a 23% increase in earnings, thanks to the new Zen architecture. AMD made steady strides in all the segments of the CPU market, from consumer and all the way to enterprise. During the earnings call, company CEO, Lisa Su answered a bunch of questions regarding team red’s future plans in both the CPU and GPU markets. One of these was pertaining to the elusive Navi GPUs. Dr. Su confirmed that we will be seeing the new GPU architecture this year itself with a planned release in Q2-2019.
AMD announced their latest GPU and the first high-end one in quite a while during CES. The Radeon Vega VII is the world’s first 7nm based GPU and is expected to go toe to toe against NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080. From preliminary benchmarks, the two seem to put up a similar performance at the same price-point but the Vega VII lacks team green’s fancy raytracing and DLSS tech.
AMD Radeon Vega Vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Benchmarks Leak Out
As already mentioned, info on the Navi architecture is scarce with the already available data coming from the company’s GPU roadmap which promises scalability and next-gen memory. Furthermore, we expect the Navi GPUs to succeed the mid-range Polaris lineup as that’s where AMD has been focusing for quite a while now. Plus having multiple high-end SKUs with only a bunch of dated products in the budget space isn’t really AMD’s thing. NVIDIA is more inclined to swing that way.
I think on the gaming side from what we are seeing, we did see sell out the increase in Q4 versus Q3. So gamers are still buying GPUs. They may be more discerning about price points. And so I can imagine that there might be a bit more softness at the high end versus in the mid-range. But we believe that we have a good understanding of what’s happening in the gaming side of the business, and it will be driven. Our gaming growth will be driven by new products. We would see that as we go through this year and with our Radeon 7 launch, as well as our Navi launches on the gaming side.
Dr. Lisa Su, AMD CEO
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Hopefully they’ll really compete with Nvidia this time, Radeon VII didn’t seem to gain alot from 7nm being Vega architecture.