Monday, September 3rd 2018
AMD Fast-tracks 7nm "Navi" GPU to Late-2018 Alongside "Zen 2" CPU
AMD is unique in the world of computing as the only company with both high-performance CPU and GPU products. For the past several years we have been executing our multi-generational leadership product and architectural roadmap. Just in the last 18 months, we successfully introduced and ramped our strongest set of products in more than a decade and our business has grown dramatically as we gained market share across the PC, gaming and datacenter markets.
The industry is at a significant inflection point as the pace of Moore's Law slows while the demand for computing and graphics performance continues to grow. This trend is fueling significant shifts throughout the industry and creating new opportunities for companies that can successfully bring together architectural, packaging, system and software innovations with leading-edge process technologies. That is why at AMD we have invested heavily in our architecture and product roadmaps, while also making the strategic decision to bet big on the 7nm process node. While it is still too early to provide more details on the architectural and product advances we have in store with our next wave of products, it is the right time to provide more detail on the flexible foundry sourcing strategy we put in place several years ago.
AMD's next major milestone is the introduction of our upcoming 7nm product portfolio, including the initial products with our second generation "Zen 2" CPU core and our new "Navi" GPU architecture. We have already taped out multiple 7nm products at TSMC, including our first 7nm GPU planned to launch later this year and our first 7nm server CPU that we plan to launch in 2019. Our work with TSMC on their 7nm node has gone very well and we have seen excellent results from early silicon. To streamline our development and align our investments closely with each of our foundry partner's investments, today we are announcing we intend to focus the breadth of our 7nm product portfolio on TSMC's industry-leading 7nm process. We also continue to have a broad partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES spanning multiple process nodes and technologies. We will leverage the additional investments GLOBALFOUNDRIES is making in their robust 14nm and 12nm technologies at their New York fab to support the ongoing ramp of our AMD Ryzen, AMD Radeon and AMD EPYC processors. We do not expect any changes to our product roadmaps as a result of these changes.
We are proud of the long-standing and successful relationships we have built with our multiple foundry partners, and we will continue to strengthen these relationships to enable the manufacturing capacity required to support our product roadmaps. I look forward to providing more details on those innovations as we prepare to introduce the industry's first 7nm GPU later this year and our first 7nm CPUs next year.
Source:
AMD Investor Relations
The industry is at a significant inflection point as the pace of Moore's Law slows while the demand for computing and graphics performance continues to grow. This trend is fueling significant shifts throughout the industry and creating new opportunities for companies that can successfully bring together architectural, packaging, system and software innovations with leading-edge process technologies. That is why at AMD we have invested heavily in our architecture and product roadmaps, while also making the strategic decision to bet big on the 7nm process node. While it is still too early to provide more details on the architectural and product advances we have in store with our next wave of products, it is the right time to provide more detail on the flexible foundry sourcing strategy we put in place several years ago.
AMD's next major milestone is the introduction of our upcoming 7nm product portfolio, including the initial products with our second generation "Zen 2" CPU core and our new "Navi" GPU architecture. We have already taped out multiple 7nm products at TSMC, including our first 7nm GPU planned to launch later this year and our first 7nm server CPU that we plan to launch in 2019. Our work with TSMC on their 7nm node has gone very well and we have seen excellent results from early silicon. To streamline our development and align our investments closely with each of our foundry partner's investments, today we are announcing we intend to focus the breadth of our 7nm product portfolio on TSMC's industry-leading 7nm process. We also continue to have a broad partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES spanning multiple process nodes and technologies. We will leverage the additional investments GLOBALFOUNDRIES is making in their robust 14nm and 12nm technologies at their New York fab to support the ongoing ramp of our AMD Ryzen, AMD Radeon and AMD EPYC processors. We do not expect any changes to our product roadmaps as a result of these changes.
We are proud of the long-standing and successful relationships we have built with our multiple foundry partners, and we will continue to strengthen these relationships to enable the manufacturing capacity required to support our product roadmaps. I look forward to providing more details on those innovations as we prepare to introduce the industry's first 7nm GPU later this year and our first 7nm CPUs next year.
97 Comments on AMD Fast-tracks 7nm "Navi" GPU to Late-2018 Alongside "Zen 2" CPU
I'm going to pull a chair so I don´t get tired.
1. AMD doesn't say Navi is coming late 2018. They're talking about Vega (20) on 7nm (MI Instinct) that we already know about for many months.
2. Zen 2 isn't coming in 2018, but 2019 as AMD clearly says in the press release.Ruff weekend, eh?
7nm vega is not part of this "major milestone" because 1- its already taped out and probably ready for mass production soon. And 2- its a niche product for a new market; AMDs way of hitting 2 birds in one stone where they start 7nm with a shrink to test the waters rather than a new architecture, and also tackle a new market while at it (low demand/low competition/low expectations = lower risk).
All in all, the title is wrong. Unless amd renamed 7nm vega to navi. Regardless, I dont expect new consumer/gaming AMD gpus anytime soon
IMO, the PR team at AMD is doing a fine job, but I want to know if the so called fast tracked GPU will actually be ready for launch this year. Short of a direct response from AMD, I seriously doubt anyone here can answer that. Try as you might.
Expanding our High-Performance Leadership with Focused 7nm Development | Advanced Micro DevicesAMD is going for the professional market with it's next 7nm GPU, so whatever response from the Red team will be focusing on profesionals. For gamers we will probably see a bigger Polaris, just to counter 2050 and 2060 cards.
The whole point of this strategy is to make people do yearly upgrades. We've seen many examples of this approach working (flagship smartphones, Sony cameras etc).
And it's a great strategy... for consumer electronics. I have no idea how AMD plans to approach corporate segment (both servers and business PCs). EPYC sales are fine (at least we're told they are), but the Ryzen PRO lineup is a complete flop.Navi seems very unlikely this year. A new architecture on a new node? Is the arch even ready? We know the node isn't (not for high volume production, anyway).
Wasn't AMD going to adopt a safer tick-tock approach? What would mean 7nm Vega first.
Moreover, 7nm Navi seems like an expensive, high-performance product tuned to compete with RTX's finesse. This still leaves AMD with very old budget lineup.
As useless as RT already is, it'll be unusable on 2070, so it's not like anything midrange needs it.
There is NO news of a Polaris refresh of any kind and neither would it make sense. People need to get it through their thick skulls: RTG is not worrying about your gaming Radeons anymore. Waste of time, waste of budget. Polaris was an attempt to attack the midrange but guess what, it can't even cover that anymore these days, not even with a shrink. In the same way I don't see Vega 20 change anything; it doesn't even target gaming and neither did its predecessor. All hope is on Navi to bring some sort of revival to AMD gaming GPUs. Or Intel. :laugh:
Basically this press release confirms what we already knew when Vega first launched. Its over, RTG isn't playing ball anymore and anything they do now serves to support the APU/CPU push.
No ,to me Rtx is Nvidias big play for customer retention, because they know what's coming.
At this point the only thing AMD has to offer is their ProRender ray tracing implementation, which can also be used with Nvidia GPUs.
It's been shown that rendering on Vega 64 is 10-20% faster than 1080ti or P6000, which means it's nowhere near RTX and really not fast enough for real-time rendering at 1080p and above.
So whenever you see AMD being proud of their RTRT performance:
a) it's pre-RTX,
b) they mean tiny live previews - not high resolution games / animations.
RTRT for gaming was meant to be usable on next get Nvidia GPUs (so whatever comes after Turing around 2020).
That said, if what we've heard about RTX is true, it's more like 2 generations ahead of GPGPU.How can you say that RT is useless? Do you even understand what it is? :)
Honestly, RT is fár, far away still. Implementation within DX12 is not going to take off either, contrary to what some may believe or say. This needs 10+ years to mature and it needs much faster and better hardware still, plus widespread adoption.
Take CS:GO as an example on that village map where you drive with vans in the beginning of round. When inside houses, at certain angles, window reflections on flooring looks perfectly aligned with the actual windows. But as you move around, reflections go totally off. I'm sure this could be addressed with minimal penalty, surely lower than ray tracing. And that's basically all there is to reflections and lighting. We don't need absurd details when hardware clearly isn't up to the task. Baby steps and doing those right, not huge leaps and then nothing works for 5 or 10 years... Unreal Engine is incredibly good with reflections and so is CryEngine. And they don't use any raytracing.
The only interesting part of this memo is AMD's emphasis of their continued use of 12/14nm. The transition to 7nm will be gradual and very slow.
1) Ray tracing (RT) is a basic rendering technique. It's been around for decades and is fundamental - not useless or unusable as one of AMD fanboys claims. :-)
2) Real-time ray tracing (RTRT) is... RT in real time ;-), i.e. fast enough (whatever that means).
It's been around for a while, but used for previews - not final renders. Previews are greatly simplified - they ignore some materials and some effects. Also the resulting live render is usually low-res and under 30fps.
3) RTRT in games means it has to be efficient enough for processing all effects, at high-resolution (1080p+) and high frequency ( has to be acceptable for gaming, i.e at maybe 1080@60fps, maybe 4K@30fps...You're talking about general processing implementation, i.e. what standard GPU cores do.
Nvidia used an ASIC and it's just way faster - just like tensor cores are way faster for neural networks.
Everything else you've said is more or less correct.
If one wants to combine RTRT with 4K@60fps, then doing that on GPGPU is 10 years away from now. But on ASIC it should be possible withing 1-2 generations, i.e. 4 years tops.
But thanks to RTX cards, you don't have to wait 10 years. For mere $1200 :-) you can already make your games look as if it's 2028 (just at 1440p tops).
And when you buy your next RTX card in 2021 for another $1200, it should be OK for 4K@60fps. :-)
There's just no way around it. AMD will have to respond with a similar tech, ignore RTRT ("Who needs realism? We're so romantic!") or magically make Navi 4x faster than Vega. :-)