AMD Reaffirms 7nm Based Ryzen 3000, EPYC Rome and Radeon Navi Graphics Cards Availability in Q3 2019

Hassan Mujtaba

AMD has reaffirmed the launch of their upcoming 7nm products, which include Ryzen 3000 CPUs, EPYC Rome server chips and AMD Radeon Navi graphics cards, in Q3 2019. All three product lines have their launch planned for Q3 2019 and AMD further confirmed availability during their annual shareholder meeting.

AMD 7nm Based Ryzen 3000, EPYC Rome and Radeon Navi Product Lineups Confirmed To Be Available in Q3 2019

The confirmation suggests that AMD is on-track for the launch of their next-generation 7nm based products which include the AMD Ryzen 3000 series processor for mainstream desktop PCs, EPYC Rome chips for servers and Radeon Navi graphics cards for gaming PCs. All three products will be featuring the TSMC process technology along with new architectures with Ryzen and EPYC being powered by the new Zen 2 CPU cores and Radeon Navi powered by a brand new GPU architecture that replaces its Vega based predecessors.

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AMD Ryzen 3000 Series Desktop CPUs - Here's What To Expect

The AMD Ryzen 3000 lineup is based on the new Zen 2 core architecture which is made possible with TSMC’s bleeding edge 7nm process node. AMD has reaffirmed that their Zen 2 based Ryzen 3000 series processors for the AM4 desktop platform will be available in mid of 2019. Back during CES 2019, AMD demoed an 8 core sample of their 3rd Gen Ryzen desktop processor against Intel's Core i9-9900K. The AMD sample was not only faster but consumed much lower power.

The sample, however, was just the tip of the iceberg as AMD assured that it was still an early version and final clock speeds would be higher in retail variants. Not only that but the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs were later confirmed to feature up to 16 cores as there is space available for a second Zen 2 die on the main chip interposer which should bring enthusiast level multi-threading performance down to the AM4 platform.

AMD has made significant changes to their CPU architecture which help deliver twice the throughput of their first generation Zen architecture. The major points include an entirely redesigned execution pipeline, major floating point advances which doubled the floating point registers to 256-bit and double bandwidth for load/store units. One of the key upgrades for Zen 2 is the doubling of the core density which means we are now looking at 2x the core count for each core complex (CCX).

  • Improved Execution Pipeline
  • Doubled Floating Point (256-bit) and Load/Store (Doubled Bandwidth)
  • Doubled Core Density
  • Half the Energy Per Operation
  • Improved Branch Prediction
  • Better Instruction Pre-Fetching
  • Re-Optimized Instruction Cache
  • Larger Op Cache
  • Increased Dispatch / Retire Bandwidth
  • Maintaining High Throughput for All Modes

Zen 2 also includes stronger hardware level enhancements when it comes to security. This further solidifies AMD CPUs against enhanced Spectre variants and these mitigations will be adopted fully by Zen 2. When it comes to Zen, AMD already had strong software level support when it came to security and they have further enhanced it through low-level software mitigations.

AMD X570 Chipset – A New House For AMD’s Next-Gen Ryzen 3000 Series CPUs

As we saw with X470, there were a few features for the Ryzen 2000 series processors which were only supported by new motherboards such as Precision Boost Overdrive and XFR 2.0. There’s no doubt that AMD’s Zen 2 based Ryzen mainstream processor family would come with new features but the main highlight would be support for PCIe Gen4. The X570 platform will be an all PCIe Gen4 solution, which means this would most probably be the first consumer platform to feature support for the new PCIe standard.

A teaser shot of an upcoming ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming motherboard which is expected to be unveiled at Computex 19.

That, however, doesn’t mean that AMD Ryzen 3000 series would only be compatible on X570 boards since just like last time, the new CPUs will be backward compatible with X470 & X370 boards too. They certainly won’t display the same feature set that will be available on the newly launched X570 lineup but will feature fully stable functionality for users who just want to drop in a new CPU and continue using their PCs without the hassle of upgrading the motherboard and everything from scratch.

AMD Radeon Navi Graphics Cards - Here's What To Expect

We know a few tidbits about the features the AMD Navi GPUs would support such as Ray Tracing which was recently confirmed to be a highlight on the next-gen Sony and Microsoft consoles which are utilizing AMD Navi 10 GPUs and Zen 2 based Ryzen CPUs. There was also talk about Variable Rate Shading being introduced on Navi GPUs as a bid by AMD to more modernize their Radeon graphics card for the mainstream market.

Navi would possibly be the last GPU architecture based on AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) DNA. It was confirmed through AMD's Linux driver that Navi is indeed based on GCN and has the latest GFX1010 codename while Vega was termed as GFX900. There would be some major improvements made on the Navi architecture in terms of IPC and 7nm efficiency would be a showcase of the new cards, providing more drastic results compared to the Radeon VII which was also 7nm based but was simply a die shrunk Vega 10 GPU (Vega 20).

We have already seen a leaked PCB shot for an upcoming Navi based GPU with GDDR6 memory and some rumored specifications which I have listed down below but one thing is for sure, Navi based Radeon GPUs will replace the existing mainstream cards while the Radeon VII will continue serving the enthusiast market as AMD's flagship until a high-end Navi card is introduced which is currently rumored for sometime in 2020.

Alleged AMD Radeon RX 3000 Series Specifications

Graphics CardGPUCompute UnitsVRAMTDPPerformance Class
(Competition)
Price
(RUMORED)
RX 3090 XTNavi 2064-225WRadeon VII + 10%$500 US
RX 3090Navi 2060-180W~Radeon VII$430 US
RX 3080 XTNavi 1056-190W~RTX 2070$330 US
RX 3080Navi 10528GB GDDR6175WVega 64 +10%$280 US
RX 3070 XTNavi 1048-160WVega 64$250 US
RX 3070Navi 12408GB GDDR6130WVega 56$200 US
RX 3060Navi 12324GB GDDR675WRX 580$140 US

AMD EPYC Rome Server Processors – Here’s What To Expect

As for the EPYC Rome processors, AMD has confirmed that they are aiming a launch in Q3 2019 which should be a few months apart from the Ryzen and the Ryzen Threadripper processors. The AMD EPYC Rome processor family is expected to lift AMD's server CPU market share to 10% by 2020 which is a great deal considering Intel's ex-CEO, Brian Krzanich, had stated that they don't want AMD capturing 15% market share but given the demand and adoption of EPYC processors in major server platforms, 15% shouldn't be too far from now.

Just for number's sake, Dell EMC has announced that they will be tripling their AMD server offering by adopting more of the EPYC range of processors.

"Out of, let's say, 50 or so platforms that we have today," he said, "three of them are AMD - we'll probably triple that by the end of this year."

He also confirmed that Dell EMC will be launching servers powered by AMD's newest architecture - a 7nm architecture codenamed 'Rome' - in the second half of 2019.

- Dominique Vanhamme (DELL EMEA vice president and general manager for storage and compute)

via IT Pro

Based on such strong growth figures and adoption rate, we can expect AMD to give major blows to Intel's Xeon efforts and their server side of operations. We should expect up to 64 cores and 128 threads along with impressive PCIe Gen 4 connectivity with up to 162  lanes as summarized here.

It should also be pointed out that when AMD was designing their 7nm Zen 2 based EPYC Rome processors, they had internally estimated what the performance of Intel's next-gen server part would be like. The next-gen 10nm part known as Ice Lake-SP is scheduled to launch for 2020 with Cascade Lake-SP and Cooper Lake-SP being offered as an intermediary solution based on 14nm (++) while the Cascade Lake-AP and Cooper Lake-AP would be designed as a multi-core HPC part.

“Rome was designed to compete favorably with “Ice Lake” Xeons, but it is not going to be competing against that chip. We are incredibly excited, and it is all coming together at one point.” – Forrest Norrod.

“Our plan for the Naples-Rome-Milan roadmap was based on assumptions around Intel’s roadmap and our estimation of what would we do if we were Intel,” Norrod continues.

“We thought deeply about what they are like, what they are not like, what their culture is and what their likely reactions are, and we planned against a very aggressive Intel roadmap, and I really Rome and Milan and what is after them against what we thought Intel could do. And then, we come to find out that they can’t do what we thought they might be able to. And so, we have an incredible opportunity

via TheNextPlatform

AMD confirmed that their EPYC Rome processors have been designed to compete favorably against Intel's Ice Lake-SP parts. This only means that AMD would have an even greater edge versus the Intel 14nm++ server parts arriving this year.

One of the biggest advantage that EPYC Rome processors will have over Intel parts is that they will be socket compatible with EPYC Naples so all of those vendors who have been using Naples would get drop-in compatibility for AMD's next-gen 7nm EPYC Rome processors on day one.

AMD looks to be in a really good position with their EPYC server processors, even more so than their desktop and mobility portfolios. If everything runs smoothly for AMD and their long-term Zen roadmap in the years to come, we can see them dominating all sectors of the CPU market again.

AMD has planned out multiple events to pre-announce their upcoming products starting off with Computex 2019 on 27th May and E3 2019 on 10th June. AMD will be presenting their new products and also announcing the proper availability dates for their consumer-based lineups which have been previously suggested for official launch in July 2019.

Which upcoming AMD 7nm consumer products are you most excited about?
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