AMD Teases Next-Gen Gaming And AI Launches At CES, What To Expect
Let's get right to the point with this one: AMD's SVP & GM of Computing & Graphics, Jack Huynh, tweeted yesterday that AMD will be holding a press event on Monday, January 6th next year. This is interesting, both because we largely know what AMD is going to show at the event, and also because it's a "media event" and not a keynote speech at the show.
The given time for the event—11 AM PST—is some seven hours before NVIDIA's keynote on Monday evening. Huynh didn't give any specific indication of what AMD will be announcing, but we can infer from his "next generation of innovation across gaming, AI PC, and commercial" remark that we will probably see new Radeon discrete GPUs, new Ryzen SoCs, and likely, new Instinct accelerators, as well as perhaps new AI processors from one of AMD's acquisitions.
In particular, we're expecting to see the long-awaited announcement of AMD's "Strix Halo" processors that should pair up to 16 Zen 5 CPU cores with a massive integrated GPU and a double-wide memory bus. We're really eager to see what angle AMD takes in marketing these chips; they're assuredly soldered-down BGA processors, so will AMD emphasize the Macbook head-to-head?
In terms of discrete graphics cards, well, we have an idea there, too. AMD's likely to announce one or both of a Radeon RX 8600 and Radeon RX 8800. Why do we feel confident in saying that? Because AMD's ROCm compute library was recently updated with specific definitions explicitly naming those products. The Radeon RX 8600 is apparently gfx1200, while gfx1201 is the Radeon RX 8800.
From AMD's ROCm repository on Github.
Not much is known about what these products will look like, but rumors put the Radeon RX 8800 down as a chip of similar size to the Radeon RX 7800 XT—simply clocked considerably higher, and with major performance uplifts in specific workloads due to architectural improvements. Which workloads? Ray-tracing, mainly.
Meanwhile, the Radeon RX 8600 is more mysterious, but rumors say that it may come with a 192-bit memory interface, which would be unusually wide for an "x600" part. We expect it to have a 128-bit memory interface and to use 3-Gigabyte GDDR6 packages, giving it 12GB of video RAM to compete against the soon-to-released Arc B580 from Intel.
Don't worry. Whatever AMD announces, we'll be right here with coverage of it, so make sure to keep your eyes on HotHardware throughout CES week, starting January 6th.
