Thursday, September 12th 2019
AMD Updates Roadmaps to Lock RDNA2 and Zen 3 onto 7nm+, with 2020 Launch Window
AMD updated its technology roadmaps to reflect a 2020 launch window for its upcoming CPU and graphics architectures, "Zen 3" and RDNA2. The two will be based on 7 nm+ , which is AMD-speak for the 7 nanometer EUV silicon fabrication process at TSMC, that promises a significant 20 percent increase in transistor-densities, giving AMD high transistor budgets and more clock-speed headroom. The roadmap slides however hint that unlike the "Zen 2" and RDNA simultaneous launch on 7th July 2019, the next-generation launches may not be simultaneous.
The slide for CPU microarchitecture states that the design phase of "Zen 3" is complete, and that the microarchitecture team has already moved on to develop "Zen 4." This means AMD is now developing products that implement "Zen 3." On the other hand, RDNA2 is still in design phase. The crude x-axis on both slides that denotes year of expected shipping, too appears to suggest that "Zen 3" based products will precede RDNA2 based ones. "Zen 3" will be AMD's first response to Intel's "Comet Lake-S" or even "Ice Lake-S," if the latter comes to fruition before Computex 2020. In the run up to RDNA2, AMD will scale up RDNA a notch larger with the "Navi 12" silicon to compete with graphics cards based on NVIDIA's "TU104" silicon. "Zen 2" will receive product stack additions in the form of a new 16-core Ryzen 9-series chip later this month, and the 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper family.
Source:
Guru3D
The slide for CPU microarchitecture states that the design phase of "Zen 3" is complete, and that the microarchitecture team has already moved on to develop "Zen 4." This means AMD is now developing products that implement "Zen 3." On the other hand, RDNA2 is still in design phase. The crude x-axis on both slides that denotes year of expected shipping, too appears to suggest that "Zen 3" based products will precede RDNA2 based ones. "Zen 3" will be AMD's first response to Intel's "Comet Lake-S" or even "Ice Lake-S," if the latter comes to fruition before Computex 2020. In the run up to RDNA2, AMD will scale up RDNA a notch larger with the "Navi 12" silicon to compete with graphics cards based on NVIDIA's "TU104" silicon. "Zen 2" will receive product stack additions in the form of a new 16-core Ryzen 9-series chip later this month, and the 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper family.
103 Comments on AMD Updates Roadmaps to Lock RDNA2 and Zen 3 onto 7nm+, with 2020 Launch Window
Oh wait, you said it had NOT helped. Interesting.Lol.Oh, dear, oh dear. RTX being compatible with API that nV asked Microsoft to add, how surprising, lol.
AMD will largely influence what to put into consoles, which will or will not (depends largely on AMD) on whether it will spark RT development or not.
It will be AMD setting RT baseline and it will again be AMD influencing what performance, and what flavor of RT to push for. If they decide "nah, f*ck the Leather Man" so will it be. (see how it worked with FreeSync vs G-Sync)
Do you really think that Microsoft is going to create a new set of Ray Tracing APIs for the consoles. No. Whatever solution AMD uses will have to be able to work with DXR.
Being in the consoles provided AMD with revenue, but it in no way has helped them gain a performance advantage over Nvidia. In fact one could argue that it has stunted there ability to develope high end GPUs, because they have had to spend so much of there engineering resources on the design and development of said console GPUs. We all have seen and heard the rumors that Navi was initially designed for the consoles first.
You are more than welcome to keep believing that AMD will set the direction of RT, but there is no historical evidence of that being the case.
† Remember that Mantel was supposed to take over the world and usher in a whole new era of performance. Not so much.
As far as Freesync and Xbox One X, yes it works great with a compatible monitor, but again it isn't the reason for there success. The majority of console gamers have their consoles hooked up to TVs. Which until very recently havent had the option for VRR of any kind. It was the monitor and PC market that set that direction.
As for RT, I think it's a fad and I'm hoping that the hype-train will run out of steam one of these days.
I'm torn on updating to any AMD this year. The X570 MB are pretty crap and I guess we won't see a all new designs until Zen 3 anyway. Navi is nice enough but want something more at 2080 levels. I'm torn between updating my old Ivy Bridge 3570K and GTX 1070 system to R5 3600 and Navi 5700XT or waiting. R5 4600 + 6700 XT + B650 should be sweet (I'm just assuming names here).
Honestly, having the best performance is secondary to upholding some of my values.
I want AMD to succeed, but I'm not going to pretend they are gong to dominate a market thanks to consoles. Remember, many PC games favor Nvidia over AMD, despite being console ports, and Unreal Engine 4, one of the most widely used game engines on the market, favors Nvidia despite being optimized for consoles and used on a wide variety of AMD powered platforms.
Anyone who is writing off Nvidia's raytracing because AMD's raytracing will be in the next gen consoles is a fool. Nvidia still dominates the high end of PC gaming and has much closer ties to PC developers. Just as having 8 cores didnt magically make all games capable of taking advantage of said cores (as shown in the performance delta between the 6 and 8 core ryzen chips) AMD RT being in consoles doesnt mean it will dominate PC gaming. That will only happen if AMD can also provide the high end hardware and support needed to optimize game engines for that tech. AMD has always struggled with that last part.
What we have now isn't full on ray tracing. It is a hybrid approach combining rasterazation and a little bit of ray tracing. There is no denying that full on ray tracing looks a lot better and more realistic than the best rasterazation has to offer. If you need any proof of that just look at the movies. All computer effects these day are done using ray tracing. I know we aren't close to that point yet, but if offloading processing to the cloud (Stadia and whatever MS is cooking up) then it does become a possibility in the future.
If you claimed had yearly experience, why don't you use your knowledge to sort thing out?
I think Lisa Su as usual is intentionally vague.Navi was not designed for ray tracing. Remenber that Navi was supposed to launch early 2018, even before Turing. If a Navi family chip shows up with some kind of ray tracing support, it will be something primitive thrown in relatively late in the design process, and nothing integrated like Turing.If your use case is primarily gaming, I suggest to wait one more cycle, and when you upgrade you also buy something one tier up so it lasts longer. I generally recommend upgrading when you "need" more performance, and there is something significantly better available.
And BTW, unlike what a certain YouTuber claim, the rest of the GPU will not idle when tracing rays, it's not like one part is used for legacy games and one part for ray tracing. The RT cores will only accelerate the tracing of the rays, not give you a finished picture by themselves. The SMs will be active all the time, plus TMUs etc. too.
Edit: Just to be clear, as years go by, Turing will surely go down in history as a crude RTRT implementation. That much is certain. But since no hardware we have now is particularly suited to what these cores do (BVH handling), it's is very possible their tasks cannot simply be folded onto traditional (or even enhanced) shaders, so the need for dedicated hardware will remain.
Intel have a tough times ahead of them, just being able to "print" 10nm/7nm CPUs it's half of the problem the other half is either getting them to clock 5GHz or introduce better much better architecture to compensate for lower clocks while the technology is up to speed.
IMO I Ryzen 2 is a letdown in my eyes clockwise I didn't believe the 5GHz rumors but I was expecting at least 4.6GHz.
But I guess if people are happy with what Ryzen 2 offers it leaves a lot of room for improvement for Ryzen 3.
AMD got its own version of Variable Refresh Rate in DisplayPort and HDMI standards. End of story.