AMD revealed its Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card reference design. This card will likely be AMD's flagship product based on its RDNA2 graphics architecture. The card features a refreshing new dual-slot, triple axial fan cooling solution that uses large new high-airflow fans that have webbed impellers, and an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that spans the entire length of this roughly-30 cm long card. A variation of the insert with the Radeon branding was teased last year. This is AMD's second reference design with triple axial fans, after the Radeon VII.

The card features two 8-pin PCIe power inputs right where you expect them. Display outputs include a pair of DisplayPorts, an HDMI, and a USB type-C. Since air exhaust is guided out of the top of the card with its fin-stack arrangement (and none from the rear I/O), AMD has a sealed I/O shield like the Radeon Fury. AMD partnered with Epic Games for a Fortnite treasure-hunt map that lets you see a 3D model of the card in from more angles. We'll spare you the treasure hunt with a video by Anshel Sag.The Fortnite video follows.

Following Wednesday's announcement of the Radeon RX 6000 series with product launches on October 28, the rumor mill started rolling full steam ahead. The RX 6000 series GPUs by AMD will be based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture, the same exact architecture powering the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, and will feature DirectX 12 Ultimate support, including hardware raytracing. A PC enthusiast on Chinese microblogging site Bilibili posted a picture of an alleged "Big Navi" prototype. Since its July 2019 debut, there have been rumors of AMD working on a new high-end GPU to take on the upper-segment of NVIDIA, given that the RX 5700 series offered competitive performance to NVIDIA's breadwinning products, such as the RTX 2070 series and RTX 2060 series.

The picture reveals the reverse side of the alleged "Big Navi" prototype's PCB, showing a larger cluster of GPU ancillaries than those behind a "Navi 10," and eight memory pads with the paper labels "Typical XT ASIC" references for a "16 Gb Samsung GDDR6 memory." Over a 256-bit wide memory interface, the chip should hence have 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. Since this is a prototype, several headers are sticking out of the PCB for the design and prototyping of the product. A tower-type CPU cooler has been MacGyvered onto the GPU (which isn't uncommon for VGA prototypes). We'll hear a lot more about this product in the run up to its October 28 launch.

AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su on Twitter just announced AMD's next-generation Ryzen processors based on the "Zen 3" microarchitecture, and next-generation Radeon RX graphics cards based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. AMD is promising a "red" October, with next-generation Ryzen "Zen 3" launch on October 8, and next-generation Radeon RDNA2 launch on October 28. We know for sure that AMD is referring to Ryzen and not EPYC, looking at the Socket AM4 MCM animation being used. The teaser picture for Radeon RDNA2 also hints at a new reference cooling solution with large axial fans.

Update 16:54 UTC: In a separate Tweet, AMD announced the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, based on the "breakthrough" RDNA2 graphics architecture.

Microsoft on Thursday rolled out the DirectX 12 feature-level 12_2 specification. This adds a set of new API-level features to DirectX 12 feature-level 12_1. It's important to understand that 12_2 is not DirectX 12 Ultimate, even though Microsoft explains in its developer blog that the four key features that make up DirectX 12 Ultimate logo requirements were important enough to be bundled into a new feature-level. At the same time, Ultimate isn't feature-level 12_1, either. The DirectX 12 Ultimate logo requirement consists of DirectX Raytracing, Mesh Shaders, Sampler Feedback, and Variable Rate Shading. These four, combined with an assortment of new features make up feature-level 12_2.

Among the updates introduced with feature-level 12_2 are DXR 1.1, Shader Model 6.5, Variable Rate Shading tier-2, Resource Binding tier-3, Tiled Resources tier-3, Conservative Rasterization tier-3, Root Signature tier-1.1, WriteBufferImmediateSupportFlags, GPU Virtual Address Bits resource expansion, among several other Direct3D raster rendering features. Feature-level 12_2 requires a WDDM 2.0 driver, and a compatible GPU. Currently, NVIDIA's "Turing" based GeForce RTX 20-series are the only GPUs capable of feature-level 12_2. Microsoft announced that AMD's upcoming RDNA2 architecture supports 12_2, too. NVIDIA's upcoming "Ampere" (RTX 20-series successors) may support it, too.

A May 2020 report put together with info from multiple sources pointed towards AMD's client-segment product roadmap going as far into the future as 2022. The roadmap was partial, with a few missing bits. VideoCardz attempted to reconstruct the roadmap based on new information from one of the primary sources of the May leak, @MeibuW. According to the roadmap, 2020 will see AMD debut its 4th Gen Ryzen "Vermeer" desktop processors featuring "Zen 3" CPU cores, built on TSMC N7e or N7P silicon fabrication process, and offering PCIe Gen 4. The "Renoir" APU silicon combining up to 8 "Zen 2" CPU cores with a 512-SP "Vega" iGPU debuted on the mobile platform, and recently launched on the desktop platform as an OEM-exclusive. It remains to be seen if AMD launches this in the DIY retail channel.

2021 is when three new codenames from AMD get some air-time. "Warhol" is codename for the 5th Gen Ryzen part that succeeds "Vermeer." Interestingly, it too is shown as a combination of "Zen 3" CPU cores, PCIe Gen 4, and 7 nm. Perhaps AMD could innovate in areas such as DRAM (switch to PC DDR5), and maybe increase core counts. DDR5 could herald a new socket, after 4 years of AM4. The second silicon bound for 2021 is "Van Gogh," an APU that combines "Zen 2" CPU cores with an RDNA2 iGPU. Interestingly, "Cezanne," bound for the same year, has the opposite CPU+iGPU combination - a newer gen "Zen 3" CPU component, and an older gen "Vega" iGPU. The two chips could target different markets, looking at their I/O, with "Van Gogh" supporting LPDDR5 memory.

Microsoft in its Hot Chips 32 presentation detailed the SoC at the heart of the upcoming Xbox Series X entertainment system. The chip mostly uses AMD IP blocks, and is built on TSMC N7e (enhanced 7 nm) process. It is a 360.4 mm² die with a transistor count of 15.3 billion. Microsoft spoke about the nuts and bolts of the SoC, including its largest component - the GPU based on AMD's new RDNA2 graphics architecture. The GPU takes up much of the chip's die area, and has a raw SIMD throughput of 12 TFLOP/s. It meets DirectX 12 Ultimate logo requirements, supporting hardware-accelerated ray-tracing.

The RDNA2 GPU powering the Xbox Series X SoC features 52 compute units spread across 26 RDNA2 dual compute units. The silicon itself physically features two additional dual CUs (taking the total physical CU count to 56), but are disabled (possibly harvesting headroom). We've detailed first-generation RDNA architecture in the "architecture" pages of our first AMD Radeon RX 5000-series "Navi" graphics card reviews, which explains much of the SIMD-level innovations from AMD that help it drive a massive SIMD IPC gain over the previous-generation GCN architecture. This hierarchy is largely carried over to RDNA2, but with the addition of a few SIMD-level components.

AMD late Tuesday released its Q2-2020 financial results, which saw the company rake in revenue of $1.93 billion for the quarter, and clock a 26 percent YoY revenue growth. In both its corporate presentation targeted at the financial analysts, and its post-results conference call, AMD revealed a handful interesting bits looking into the near future. Much of the focus of AMD's presentation was in reassuring investors that [unlike Intel] it is promising a stable and predictable roadmap, that nothing has changed on its roadmap, and that it intends to execute everything on time. "Over the past couple of quarters what we've seen is that they see our performance/capability. You can count on us for a consistent roadmap. Milan point important for us, will ensure it ships later this year. Already started engaging people on Zen4/5nm. We feel customers are very open. We feel well positioned," said president and CEO Dr Lisa Su.

For starters, there was yet another confirmation from the CEO that the company will launch the "Zen 3" CPU microarchitecture across both the consumer and data-center segments before year-end, which means both Ryzen and EPYC "Milan" products based on "Zen 3." Also confirmed was the introduction of the RDNA2 graphics architecture across consumer graphics segments, and the debut of the CDNA scalar compute architecture. The company started shipping semi-custom SoCs to both Microsoft and Sony, so they could manufacture their next-generation Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 game consoles in volumes for the Holiday shopping season. Semi-custom shipments could contribute big to the company's Q3-2020 earnings. CDNA won't play a big role in 2020 for AMD, but there will be more opportunities for the datacenter GPU lineup in 2021, according to the company. CDNA2 debuts next year.

After Sony has showcased Unreal Engine 5 capabilities on the new PlayStation 5 console, there was a counterpart event missing from Microsoft. However, Microsoft has announced today that the company will host a live stream event on July 23rd. That is the date when Microsoft will host the event on YouTube and Twitch. Starting at 9 am PT time, the company will showcase the capabilities of the new Xbox Series X console. Possibly, Microsoft will show ray tracing and all the latest technology advancements with AMD's RDNA2 graphics card found inside the new console. What we can expect in terms of games is Halo Infinite and maybe new Forza and Gears of War games. Either way, we have to wait and find out on July 23rd.

AMD's "Navi 20-series" GPUs implementing the RDNA2 graphics architecture are barely close to launch (September 2020 unveiling expected); and there's already talk of the "Navi 30-series." When digging through the driver code for AMD Radeon graphics that ships with Apple's MacOS "Big Sur" developer beta 1, Hardware Leaks (_rogame) uncovered pointers to an AMD "navi31" GPU. This could be the very first indication that AMD will codename successors of the RDNA2-based "Navi 2#" GPUs, such as the "Navi 21," under the "Navi 3#" series. It remains to be seen if these chips implement the RDNA3 graphics architecture, or are a refresh of RDNA2-based chips on a newer process.

The earliest reports on AMD's next-generation "Cezanne" APU silicon pointed at the possibility of the chip combining "Zen 3" CPU cores with a next-generation iGPU solution based on RDNA2 ("Navi 2#"). AMD plans to launch "Cezanne" in 2021, which makes it the immediate successor to "Renoir." A report by Igor's Lab has fresh details on "Cezanne." Apparently the chip sticks with the "Vega" graphics architecture on its iGPU. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's the same exact iGPU as the 8 CU version on "Renoir."

On the other hand, the "Van Gogh" silicon slated for 2021 is expected to receive RDNA2 graphics. It's important to note here that "Van Gogh" and "Cezanne" sit in the same product stack, and "Van Gogh" does not succeed "Cezanne." Rather, it's the codename for an entry-level APU, succeeding "Dali" (Athlon 3000G), which also means the RDNA2-based iGPU will be a lot slimmer than the "Vega" based one on "Cezanne." It's only by 2022 that AMD will have a performance-segment APU with RDNA2-based iGPU, with "Rembrandt." Find our older article getting into AMD's roadmaps here.

AMD is updating the Radeon logo yet again, as spotted by Casmoden on Twitter. The new logo was tucked away in the main branding screen of a "Godfall" trailer that revealed the game's Holiday 2020 release date. Tucked away besides developer- and console platform logos is the new AMD Radeon logo, indicating optimization for AMD GPUs. The new logo features a Ryzen logo typeset (resembling the ESPN logo, with floating tops of the letters E, R, and D). In a March 2020 tweet, AMD Radeon RX group head Scott Herkelman mentioned that the lack of logo alignment between Ryzen, EPYC, and Radeon had been "bugging them." For reference, there's the current AMD Radeon logo in a company slide. AMD could likely debut the new Radeon logo with its upcoming RDNA2-based "Big Navi" graphics card that is expected to be announced in September.

AMD has a lot riding on RDNA2, its first graphics architecture that meets the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo requirements, introducing real-time ray-tracing to the lineup. RDNA2 is confirmed to be part of the SoC that powers next-gen consoles PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The company is simultaneously readying its own Radeon RX discrete graphics cards based on the Navi 2# silicon, based on RDNA2, with a leading part unofficially called the "Big Navi" given its alleged lofty specs increase over the "Navi 10." Turns out, that this GPU, and not next-gen consoles, will debut RDNA2.

AMD is planning a big gamer-specific event in late-Q3/early-Q4, likely September, where it plans to announce its 4th generation Ryzen desktop processors based on the "Zen 3" microarchitecture, and Radeon RX graphics cards based on RDNA2, including the "Big Navi." Speaking at the Bank of America Securities Global Technology Conference, AMD CFO Devinder Kumar confirmed that "Big Navi" will be a halo product and not merely a lofty performance increase over the RX 5700 XT to make AMD competitive against GeForce "Ampere." He states "there's a lot of excitement for Navi 2, or what our fans have dubbed as the Big Navi," adding "Big Navi is a halo product." He goes on to state that "enthusiasts love to buy the best, and we are certainly working on giving them the best." AMD's product stack so far is application-specific, rather than competition-specific. The RX 5700 XT was designed for 1440p gaming, and ended up competitive to the RTX 2070. "Big Navi" could hence have a lofty design goal: 4K gaming with ray-tracing.

Linux kernel patches reference an AMD "Sienna Cichlid" GPU, which Phoronix believes could be the fabled "Big Navi" GPU. We know this is a GPU and not a headless CDNA scalar processor as the patches include code for VCN 3.0 video encoding capabilities (RDNA2's media engine), and DCN3 (RDNA2's display engine), which constitute bulk that AMD could get rid of on CDNA chips. The unusual internal codename could reference AMD's next generation RDNA2 architecture based flagship GPU, armed with 80 compute units (5,120 stream processors), Radeon Intersection Engines (accelerate real-time ray-tracing). The codename comes across as unusual, but AMD does tend to use wacky internal codenames to detect sources of leaks.

Several future AMD processor codenames across various computing segments surfaced courtesy of an Expreview leak that's largely aligned with information from Komachi Ensaka. It does not account for "Matisse Refresh" that's allegedly coming out in June-July as three gaming-focused Ryzen socket AM4 desktop processors; but roadmap from 2H-2020 going up to 2022 sees many codenames surface. To begin with, the second half of 2020 promises to be as action packed as last year's 7/7 mega launch. Over in the graphics business, the company is expected to debut its DirectX 12 Ultimate-compliant RDNA2 client graphics, and its first CDNA architecture-based compute accelerators. Much of the processor launch cycle is based around the new "Zen 3" microarchitecture.

The server platform debuting in the second half of 2020 is codenamed "Genesis SP3." This will be the final processor architecture for the SP3-class enterprise sockets, as it has DDR4 and PCI-Express gen 4.0 I/O. The EPYC server processor is codenamed "Milan," and combines "Zen 3" chiplets along with an sIOD. EPYC Embedded (FP6 package) processors are codenamed "Grey Hawk."

AMD's RDNA2 graphics architecture, which sees real-time ray-tracing among other DirectX 12 Ultimate features, could see the company double the amount of stream processors generation-over-generation, according to a specs leak by _rogame. The increase in stream processors would fall in line with AMD's effort to increase performance/Watt by 50%. It may appear like the resulting SKUs finally measure up to the likes of the RTX 2080 Ti, but AMD has GeForce "Ampere" in its competitive calculus, and should the recent specs reveal hold up, the new "Navi 21" could end up being a performance-segment competitor to GeForce graphics cards based on the "GA104" ("TU104" successor), rather than a flagship-killer.

The RDNA2-based "Navi 21" GPU allegedly features 80 RDNA2 compute units amounting to 5,120 stream processors. AMD might tap into a refined 7 nm-class silicon fabrication node by TSMC to build these chips, either N7P or N7+. The die-size could measure up to 505 mm², and AMD could aim for a 50% performance/Watt gain over the "Navi 10." AMD could carve out as many as 10 SKUs out of the "Navi 21," but only three are relevant to the gamers. The SKU with the PCI device ID "0x731F: D1" succeeds the RX 5700 XT. The one bearing "0x731F: D3" succeeds the RX 5700, with a variant name "Navi 21 XL." The "Navi 21 XE" variant has a PCI ID of "0x731F: DF," and succeeds the RX 5600 XT.

AMD's next-generation RDNA2 architecture based Radeon RX series client-segment graphics cards will launch in September 2020, according to a DigiTimes report citing industry sources. This would make September a mighty busy month for hardware launches, as the company is also expected to debut its 4th generation Ryzen "Vermeer" (and possibly "Renoir) desktop processors in the AM4 package. NVIDIA is expected to debut its GeForce "Ampere" client-segment graphics cards around the same time. Although not in the same computing segment, Intel could also debut its 11th generation Core "Tiger Lake" mobile processors.

RDNA2 is an important launch for AMD as it's the company's first graphics architecture that meets the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo requirements, which include real-time ray-tracing capability leveraging DXR, variable rate shading, mesh shaders, and sampler feedback. AMD and NVIDIA will be debuting their graphics cards close to the release of CD Projekt's "Cyberpunk 2077," which is emerging as the year's most hotly anticipated game.

Power Logic, a graphics card cooling solution OEM, in an interview with Taiwan tech industry observer DigiTimes, commented that it expects graphics card shipments to rise in the second half of 2020, on the backs of new product announcements from both NVIDIA and AMD, as well as HPC accelerators from the likes of Intel and NVIDIA. NVIDIA is expected to launch its "Ampere" based GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards, while AMD is preparing to launch its Radeon RX 6000-series "Navi 2#" graphics cards based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. Power Logic has apparently commenced prototyping certain cooling solutions, and is expected to begin mass-production at its Jiangxi-based plant towards the end of Q2-2020; so it could begin shipping coolers to graphics card manufacturers in the following quarters.

AMD in its post Q1-2020 earnings release disclosures stated that the company is "on track" to launching its next-generation "Zen 3" CPU microarchitecture and RDNA2 graphics architecture in late-2020. The company did not reveal in what shape or form the two will debut. AMD is readying "Zen 3" based EPYC "Milan" enterprise processors, "Vermeer" Ryzen desktop processors, and "Cezanne" Ryzen mobile APUs based on "Zen 3," although there's no word on which product line the microarchitecture will debut with. "Zen 3" compute dies (CCDs) are expected to do away with the quad-core compute complex (CCX) arrangement of cores, and are expected to be built on a refined 7 nm-class silicon fabrication process, either TSMC N7P or N7+.

The only confirmed RDNA2 based products we have as of now are the semi-custom SoCs that drive the Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X next-generation consoles, which are expected to debut by late-2020. The AMD tweet, however, specifies "GPUs" (possibly referring to discrete GPUs). Also, with AMD forking its graphics IP to RDNA (for graphics processors) and CDNA (for headless compute accelerators), we're fairly sure AMD is referring to a Radeon RX or Radeon Pro launch in the tweet. Microsoft's announcement of the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo is expected to expedite launch of Radeon RX discrete GPUs based on RDNA2, as the current RDNA architecture doesn't meet the logo requirements.

AMD's 7 nm "Renoir" silicon breathed life into the notebook processor market, by bringing 8-core/16-thread CPU performance into segments Intel reserved for 4-core/8-thread; and beat Intel in the iGPU performance front. 7 nm brought performance-Watt uplifts that spell serious competition for Intel across all notebook form factors, be it 15 W or 45 W. According to _rogame, who has a knack of getting far-out hardware rumors right, AMD has its successor on the drawing-board, and it's codenamed "Cézanne," after the French post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne.

"Cézanne" could prove vital for AMD's foothold in the premium mobile computing segments as Intel is preparing to launch its 10 nm+ "Tiger Lake" processor soon, with advanced "Willow Cove" CPU cores, and Xe based integrated graphics. AMD plans to tap into its very latest IP. Although its core-count is not known, "Cézanne" will feature CPU cores based on the latest "Zen 3" microarchitecture. The iGPU will receive its biggest performance uplift in 3 generations, with an iGPU based on the cutting-edge RDNA2 graphics architecture that meets DirectX 12 Ultimate logo requirements.

Microsoft Thursday released the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo. This is not a new API with any new features, but rather a differentiator for graphics cards and game consoles that support four key modern features of DirectX 12. This helps consumers recognize the newer and upcoming GPUs, and tell them apart from some older DirectX 12 capable GPUs that were released in the mid-2010s. For a GPU to be eligible for the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo, it must feature hardware acceleration for ray-tracing with the DXR API; must support Mesh Shaders, Variable Rate Shading (VRS), and Sampler Feedback (all of the four). The upcoming Xbox Series X console features this logo by default. Microsoft made it absolutely clear that the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo isn't meant as a compatibility barrier, and that these games will work on older hardware, too.

As it stands, the "Navi"-based Radeon RX 5000 series are "obsolete", just like some Turing cards from the GeForce GTX 16-series. At this time, the only shipping product which features the logo is NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20-series and the TITAN RTX, as they support all the above features.

Sony in a YouTube stream keynote by PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny, detailed the upcoming entertainment system's hardware. There are three key areas where the company has invested heavily in driving forward the platform by "balancing revolutionary and evolutionary" technologies. A key design focus with PlayStation 5 is storage. Cerny elaborated on how past generations of the PlayStation guided game developers' art direction as the low bandwidths and latencies of optical discs and HDDs posed crippling latencies arising out of mechanical seeks, resulting in infinitesimally lower data transfer rates than what the media is capable of in best case scenario (seeking a block of data from its outermost sectors). SSD was the #1 most requested hardware feature by game developers during the development of PS5, and Sony responded with something special.

Each PlayStation 5 ships with a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 SSD with a flash controller that has been designed in-house by Sony. The controller features 12 flash channels, and is capable of at least 5.5 GB/s transfer speeds. When you factor in the exponential gains in access time, Sony expects the SSD to provide a 100x boost in effective storage sub-system performance, resulting in practically no load times.

Sony has announced via Twitter that their lead system architect Mark Cerny will "provide a deep dive into PS5's system architecture, and how it will shape the future of games" tomorrow. This is likely the start of Sony's marketing campaign for the release of the PS5 which is due out Holidays 2020.

The Japanese company has remained puzzlingly tight-lipped regarding their next-gen games console, which is a far cry from Microsoft's position, who have been releasing details and teasing their next-gen Xbox Series X system for a while now. It remains to be seen how Sony's system will differ from Microsoft's Xbox Series X, since most specs are rumored to be close on both consoles. The underlying Zen 2 architecture for the CPUs is confirmed in both consoles, and so should the fabrication process and RDNA2-based graphics with dedicated ray tracing hardware. It remains to be seen how the companies will aim to differentiate their offerings.

Microsoft just put out of the complete hardware specs-sheet of its next-generation Xbox Series X entertainment system. The list of hardware can go toe to toe with any modern gaming desktop, and even at its production scale, we're not sure if Microsoft can break-even at around $500, possibly counting on game and DLC sales to recover some of the costs and turn a profit. To begin with the semi-custom SoC at the heart of the beast, Microsoft partnered with AMD to deploy its current-generation "Zen 2" x86-64 CPU cores. Microsoft confirmed that the SoC will be built on the 7 nm "enhanced" process (very likely TSMC N7P). Its die-size is 360.45 mm².

The chip packs 8 "Zen 2" cores, with SMT enabling 16 logical processors, a humongous step up from the 8-core "Jaguar enhanced" CPU driving the Xbox One X. CPU clock speeds are somewhat vague. It points to 3.80 GHz nominal and 3.66 GHz with SMT enabled. Perhaps the console can toggle SMT somehow (possibly depending on whether a game requests it). There's no word on the CPU's cache sizes.

AMD at its Financial Analyst Day 2020 presentation made a major clarification about its silicon fabrication process. It was previously believed that the company's upcoming "Zen 3" CPU microarchitecture and RDNA2 graphics architectures were based on TSMC's N7+ (7 nm EUV) silicon fabrication process because AMD would mark the two as "7 nm+" in its marketing slides. Throughout its Financial Analyst Day presentation, however, AMD avoided using that marker, and resorted to an amorphous "7 nm" marker, prompting one of the financial analysts to seek a clarification. At the time, AMD responded that they were aligning their marketing with that of TSMC, and hence chose to use "7 nm" in its new slides.

It turns out that the next step to TSMC N7, the company's current-generation 7 nm DUV silicon fabrication node, isn't N7+ (7 nm EUV), but rather it has a nodelet along the way, which the foundry refers to as N7P. This is a generational refinement of N7, but does not use EUV lithography, which means it may not offer the 15-20 percent gains in transistor densities offered by N7+ over N7. AMD clarified that "7 nm+" in its past presentations did not intend to signify N7+, and that the "+" merely denoted an improvement over N7. At the same time, it won't specify whether "Zen 3" and RDNA2 are based on N7P or N7+, so the company doesn't rule out N7+, either. We'll probably learn more as we near the late-2020 launch of "Zen 3" as EPYC "Milan."

With its 7 nm RDNA architecture that debuted in July 2019, AMD achieved a nearly 50% gain in performance/Watt over the previous "Vega" architecture. At its 2020 Financial Analyst Day event, AMD made a big disclosure: that its upcoming RDNA2 architecture will offer a similar 50% performance/Watt jump over RDNA. The new RDNA2 graphics architecture is expected to leverage 7 nm+ (7 nm EUV), which offers up to 18% transistor-density increase over 7 nm DUV, among other process-level improvements. AMD could tap into this to increase price-performance by serving up more compute units at existing price-points, running at higher clock speeds.

AMD has two key design goals with RDNA2 that helps it close the feature-set gap with NVIDIA: real-time ray-tracing, and variable-rate shading, both of which have been standardized by Microsoft under DirectX 12 DXR and VRS APIs. AMD announced that RDNA2 will feature dedicated ray-tracing hardware on die. On the software side, the hardware will leverage industry-standard DXR 1.1 API. The company is supplying RDNA2 to next-generation game console manufacturers such as Sony and Microsoft, so it's highly likely that AMD's approach to standardized ray-tracing will have more takers than NVIDIA's RTX ecosystem that tops up DXR feature-sets with its own RTX feature-set.