Ryzen 3000 Will Be AMD's First Shipping 7nm Zen 2 CPUs, Radeon Navi Lands In Q3
During an earnings call with investors, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su and other executives confirmed some interesting details about the company's upcoming Zen 2-based processor lineup, as well as Navi on the GPU side. We now know, for example, that Epyc server processors based on Zen 2 will show up in the third quarter of this year.
"We are on track to being Rome production shipments in the second quarter to support a third quarter launch," Dr. Lisa Su said.
What that means is that Zen 2 will poke its head in AMD's consumer products first, and specifically the forthcoming Ryzen 3000 series of desktop processors. Barring any last minute snags, AMD is expected to unveil its initial Ryzen 3000 lineup at Computex next month, alongside a new X570 chipset with PCIe 4.0 support.
Zen 2 is the third generation of AMD's Zen microarchitecture, and the first to be built on a 7-nanometer manufacturing process. The ones that came before it include Zen+ (12nm, Ryzen 2000 series) and Zen (14nm, Ryzen 1000 series). Switching to TSMC's 7nm node should enable faster clockspeeds, better power efficiency, and strong IPC (instructions per clock) performance. As it pertains to the latter, it's rumored that Ryzen 3000 CPUs will introduce a 15 percent IPC uplift over Zen+.
AMD is also expected to introduce Ryzen 3000 CPUs with more than 8 cores and 16 threads at the top end. They include the Ryzen 9 3850X and Ryzen 9 3800X, both with 16 cores and 32 threads. Leaks have also pointed to 12-core/24-thread CPUs, and course 8-core/16-thread and 6-core/12-thread options.
What about Navi? We are also expecting AMD to announce its next-generation Navi GPU architecture at Computex, though an actual launch will come sometime in the July-September period.
"We are well-positioned to grow GPU revenue in the second quarter and through the second half of the year as we expect to introduce our first 7-nanometer Navi gaming GPUs in the third quarter," Dr. Lisa Su said.
Navi is also being built on a 7nm manufacturing process. It's not actually the first 7nm gaming GPU, though—that distinction belongs to the Radeon VII. How Navi compares is the big question on everyone's mind, and we will have to wait several more months to find out.
One thing we do know about Navi is that it will eventually support real-time ray tracing. It's not clear if the first-run Navi parts will on the desktop, though it has already been confirmed that Navi will be part of the SoC inside Sony's PlayStation 5, with ray tracing capabilities.
That said, what we are anticipating is that the first Navi products will be lower end and mid-range parts, followed by higher end Navi products sometime later.
