The first batch of Navi cards are solid efforts by AMD—both the
Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700 do a good job of competing with comparatively priced graphics cards from NVIDIA. That said, the
GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is still the king of the hill. AMD does not have a card to compete with that beast, but company CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed that high-end Navi cards are coming.
We already had more than an inkling of that, of course—it is widely expected that a separate round of
Navi cards will bolster performance and introduce ray tracing support. The latter has already been confirmed by Sony, with regards to the custom Navi GPU that will be inside its
PlayStation 5 next year, and the same is true of Microsoft's next Xbox console, called
Project Scarlett.
Still, it's nice to have the CEO of a company offer up a confirmation. Dr. Su also said the same about 7-nanometer mobile CPUs. The comments came during a conference call with investors. Here is how the exchange took place:
Question: Can you give us a sense, if you can, on 7-nanometer high-end Navi and mobile 7-nanometer CPUs, if you can? Thanks.
Dr. Lisa Su: Hans, you asked the good product questions. I would say, they are coming. You should expect that our execution on those are on track, and we have a rich 7-nanometer portfolio beyond the products that we have currently announced in the upcoming quarters. Thank you, Hans.
Dr. Su was careful not to say exactly when those products are coming, but her remarks are better than a canned avoidance of the question.
When higher end Navi cards do arrive, it will be interesting to see how they compete with
NVIDIA's top offerings. NVIDIA upped the ante in the lead up to Navi with its
GeForce RTX Super models, which prompted AMD to lower the prices on its Radeon RX 5700 series right out of the gate (AMD claims it
baited NVIDIA into making a move).
On the CPU side, seeing the
Zen 2 architecture in mobile form will also be interesting. They will go up against
Intel's just-announced 10th generation Core mobile products, also known as Ice Lake. Fun times ahead, in other words.