Wednesday, January 9th 2019
AMD's CES 2019 Keynote - Stream & Live Blog
CPUs or GPUs? Ryzen 3000 series up to 16 cores or keeping their eight? Support for raytracing? Navi or die-shrunk Vega for consumer graphics? The questions around AMD's plans for 2019 are still very much in the open, but AMD's Lisa Su's impending livestream should field the answers to many of these questions, so be sure to watch the full livestream, happening in just a moment.
You can find the live stream here, at YouTube.
18:33 UTC: Looking forward, Lisa mentioned a few technology names without giving additional details: "... when you're talking about future cores, Zen 2, Zen 3, Zen 4, Zen 5, Navi, we're putting all of these architectures together, in new ways".
18:20 UTC: New Ryzen 3rd generation processors have been teased. The upcoming processors are based on Zen 2, using 7 nanometer technology. AMD showed a live demo of Forza Horizon 4, using Ryzen third generation, paired with Radeon Vega VII, which is running "consistently over 100 FPS at highest details at 1080p resolution". A second demo, using Cinebench, pitted an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 3rd generation processor against the Intel Core i9-9900K. The Ryzen CPU was "not final frequency, an early sample". Ryzen achieved a score of 2057 using 135 W, while Intel achieved a score of 2040 using 180 W.. things are looking good for Ryzen 3rd generation indeed. Lisa also confirmed that next-gen Ryzen will support PCI-Express 4.0, which doubles the bandwidth per lane over PCI-Express 3.0. Ryzen third generation will run on the same AM4 infrastructure as current Ryzen; all existing users of Ryzen can simply upgrade to the new processors, when they launch in the middle of 2019 (we think Computex).
Ryzen third generation uses a chiplet design. The smaller die on the right contains 8-cores/16-threads using 7 nanometer technology. The larger die on the left is the IO die, which consists of things like the memory controller and PCI-Express connectivity, to shuffle data between the CPU core die and the rest of the system.
18:10 UTC: Shifting gears now to talk about processors. First up is EPYC 2nd generation, built using on the 7 nanometer process. A scientific demo was presented showing a single EPYC processor, beating two Intel Xeon 8180 processors (28 core/56 thread), by a significant amount. Regarding availability, Lisa said that EPYC second generation "is absolutely on track and we will start shipping in the middle of 2019".
18:05 UTC: Lisa announced a partnership with Google, to deliver AAA game streaming to end-users. A demo of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey was shown running at 1080p with 60 FPS. The servers are located in Google's cloud and are powered by AMD Radeon GPUs.
17:55 UTC: Ubisoft just confirmed that "at launch, the Division 2 will support the full set of advanced Radeon technology features" (Rapid Packed Math, Async Compute and Shader Intrinsics). AMD is bundling the game with all Radeon VII cards, and select Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 processors for free.
17:45 UTC: AMD Radeon VII (pronounced "Radeon Seven") has been unveiled - the next gaming GPU from AMD. It's the world's first 7 nm gaming GPU, based on the Vega 10 shrink to the 7 nm node; this is not Navi. The card has "only" 60 CUs, which is a few less than Vega 64, but to make up for that, it is clocked higher. Thanks to 7 nanometer technology, power draw is lower, which helps keep temperatures and noise levels down, too. Gaming performance is up 35-42% in games, thanks to a massive 1.8 GHz clock speed. This should make the card competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 as shown by a slide during the event. With 16 GB of HBM2 memory, the card features an insane amount of memory for just gaming, which is probably why AMD is marketing the card at "creators" too, not unlike what NVIDIA does with Titan. The HBM2 memory is connected to the GPU using a 4096-bit memory interface.
Radeon VII releases on February 7th at a price of $699. For a limited time the card will be bundled with Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 2 and The Division 2.
17:43 UTC: Lisa is talking about AMD's new Radeon software Adrenalin 2019, which we covered in great detail here.
17:40 UTC: Phil Spencer, Head of Gaming, Microsoft is on stage and praises the relationship between AMD and Microsoft, and confirms that the companies will work on future projects together, which probably means next-gen Xbox consoles.
17:30 UTC: AMD is announcing that their Radeon Software will now be a first class citizen for Ryzen Mobile systems, which probably means that Ryzen Desktop APUs will also receive this kind of driver support. In the past this was a big issue for many users. The new drivers will be available directly from AMD's website, starting February 2019.
18:33 UTC: Looking forward, Lisa mentioned a few technology names without giving additional details: "... when you're talking about future cores, Zen 2, Zen 3, Zen 4, Zen 5, Navi, we're putting all of these architectures together, in new ways".
18:20 UTC: New Ryzen 3rd generation processors have been teased. The upcoming processors are based on Zen 2, using 7 nanometer technology. AMD showed a live demo of Forza Horizon 4, using Ryzen third generation, paired with Radeon Vega VII, which is running "consistently over 100 FPS at highest details at 1080p resolution". A second demo, using Cinebench, pitted an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 3rd generation processor against the Intel Core i9-9900K. The Ryzen CPU was "not final frequency, an early sample". Ryzen achieved a score of 2057 using 135 W, while Intel achieved a score of 2040 using 180 W.. things are looking good for Ryzen 3rd generation indeed. Lisa also confirmed that next-gen Ryzen will support PCI-Express 4.0, which doubles the bandwidth per lane over PCI-Express 3.0. Ryzen third generation will run on the same AM4 infrastructure as current Ryzen; all existing users of Ryzen can simply upgrade to the new processors, when they launch in the middle of 2019 (we think Computex).
17:45 UTC: AMD Radeon VII (pronounced "Radeon Seven") has been unveiled - the next gaming GPU from AMD. It's the world's first 7 nm gaming GPU, based on the Vega 10 shrink to the 7 nm node; this is not Navi. The card has "only" 60 CUs, which is a few less than Vega 64, but to make up for that, it is clocked higher. Thanks to 7 nanometer technology, power draw is lower, which helps keep temperatures and noise levels down, too. Gaming performance is up 35-42% in games, thanks to a massive 1.8 GHz clock speed. This should make the card competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 as shown by a slide during the event. With 16 GB of HBM2 memory, the card features an insane amount of memory for just gaming, which is probably why AMD is marketing the card at "creators" too, not unlike what NVIDIA does with Titan. The HBM2 memory is connected to the GPU using a 4096-bit memory interface.
Radeon VII releases on February 7th at a price of $699. For a limited time the card will be bundled with Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 2 and The Division 2.
132 Comments on AMD's CES 2019 Keynote - Stream & Live Blog
IE. 8700K will be mainstream performance very soon, and that is good.
Chiplet allows for all of the rumors to be true (16 core)www.amd.com/system/files/documents/radeon-instinct-mi60-datasheet.pdf
2) The way volume is computed does not mean "alot of people making alot of transactions". At all. There is no way to tell from the volume whether it was a few large transactions or many tiny ones. 60% of AMD stock is owned institutionally as per the last 13F so it would be insane to assume "only small fry investors" dumped their stock.
3) AMD pricing themselves into an bad competitive position in a core market (GFX) for the foreseeable future is kind of a big deal; I know you're trying to minimize it by "Lisa said Vega VII is is 699$" but that directly translates to their sales. Institutional investors react much, much faster and have a broader set of instruments than your average Joe.... If you think they're sitting on their hands watching a few hundred million evaporate, you're dreaming. They were the first ones out.
You can see the traces reflecting in the light lol.
So there is a reason why Lisa Su said things the way she did, it's not that she don't believe in the product, it's the fact that AMD don't have the final stepping yet and haven't decided on the final core configurations and clock speeds. I'm sure they have taped out what they intend to be the final stepping, but it will still be a while before they get these back from the factory. Also notice that AMD didn't commit to a release date, this could be due to concerns about yields, risk of needing extra steppings or simply potential delays in motherboards/chipsets.
So we know that AMD doesn't know the final specs yet, because the final chips doesn't exist yet, so we therefore know that anyone who claims to know these specs are lying. We commonly get these "leaks" ahead of releases, and while some of them might be partially based on actual sources, any claims of specific clock speeds etc. months ahead of release is pure speculation. There is nothing wrong in speculating as long as you don't claim it's anything other than that. But there are certain tech websites and opinionators on Youtube who keep coming with these "leaks", fully knowing these to be pure speculation. And people keep "forgiving" them, even though their leaks are all over the place and nearly all the specifics in the "leaks" are wrong, except for the obvious info we all can come up with. So when these "leaks" come from these certain people (you all know who), it's not leaks, it's fake news trying to drive traffic to their Youtube channel or website.I wouldn't speculate too much considering we don't know the clocks of their engineering sample.
But I would mention that for Zen 1 Cinebench is giving AMD more favorable scores than their general performance vs. Intel, and assuming Zen 2 isn't worse than Zen 1, I would expect Zen 2 to be a bit ahead of 9900K in Cinebench to be on par with it on average.