AMD at Computex 2019 | Announces Navi GPU and 3rd Gen Ryzen CPU

“If you look at the history of AMD, we’ve always had this vision. Our vision is to push technology to its limits. And it is all about industry first and introducing new technologies that haven’t been introduced before.” – Dr. Lisa Su, CEO & President, AMD.

Advanced Micro Devices, commonly referred to as AMD, is an American multinational company that manufactures and develops technologies related to microprocessors, graphics processors, motherboard chipsets, etc. for personal computers, servers, embedded systems applications, and more. The company is a major competitor to both Intel and Nvidia, with regards to CPUs and GPUs respectively.

In their first-ever keynote at Computex 2019 held at Taipei City, AMD CEO & President Dr. Lisa Su revealed to us the much awaited Navi GPUs as well as a brand new CPU lineup from Ryzen 3rd Gen family. The keynote was mostly conducted by Dr. Su who stated how their new and upcoming technology would change gaming performance as we know it, and how their products will give us an edge over other competing hardware in the market. The keynote also had other notable spoke-persons from the hardware industry such as Joe Hsieh, Chief Operating Officer, Asus; Roanne Sones, Corporate Vice President of OS Platforms, Microsoft; and Jerry Kao, Co-Chief Operating Officer, Acer.

Let us breakdown AMD’s keynote at Computex 2019 and discuss them in detail.

Datacentre

AMD CEO & President Dr. Lisa Su announced big plans for the company with regards to Datacentres and Super Computing. According to her announcement, AMD has been selected by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the United States Department of Energy to build the world’s first exaFLOP supercomputer along with Cray. She stated the supercomputer, named as Frontier, would be using a future generation of AMD EPYC and AMD Radeon Instinct and will have a performance of 1.5 exaFLOPs. It is set for release in 2021 and once it does, will become the world’s fastest supercomputer based on AMD technology.

Following the announcement of Frontier, Lisa Su revealed AMD’s ‘Rome’ processor family a.k.a 2nd Gen AMD EPYC. It is projected to provide 2X the performance-per-socket and up to 4X the floating performance-per-socket as compared to its previous generation. A demonstration featuring a two-processor 2nd Gen AMD EPYC based server and a two-processor Intel Xeon 8280 based server, both separately running a NAMD Apo1 v2.12 benchmark test, showed that the 2nd Gen EPYC is over twice as fast as the Xeon 8280.

The 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors are set to be launched in Q3 2019.

Navi GPUs

Before directly announcing their new GPU, Dr. Lisa Su unveiled RDNA, a gaming architecture which according to her, “will power the foundation of gaming for the next decade”. It is projected to provide up to 1.25X higher performance-per-clock and up to 1.5X higher performance-per-watt over the previous GCN architecture, thus, providing us with a better gaming performance by increasing the bandwidth and reducing latency.

After speaking about RDNA architecture in detail, Lisa Su finally announced the much awaited 7nm AMD Navi GPU family a.k.a the AMD Radeon RX 5000 series graphics cards. A demonstration showed the performance of a RDNA powered RX 5700 series GPU against a Nvidia RTX 2070 running a Strange Brigade demo. The AMD RX 5700 series GPU provided a roughly 10% performance gain as compared to its competitor.

According to Dr. Lisa Su, AMD’s keynote at Computex 2019 was just a preview for Navi GPUs and more details will be revealed on June 10, 2019 at an AMD E3 Livestream event. As for availability, the RX 5000 series graphics cards will hit the market in July this year.

3rd Generation Ryzen CPUs

The final reveal of the keynote was the unveiling of the new 7nm AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen processors. Based on the new Zen 2 core architecture, these CPUs have 2X the Cache as compared to their 2nd generation predecessors and provide a 15% performance gain for all applications. Accompanying this announcement was the revelation of their new Ryzen 9 series processors. The first one is Ryzen 9 3900X with 12 cores/24 threads and a Boost Clock of 4.6 GHz. This CPU beat Intel Core i9-9920X by a 16% performance gain during a Blender Rendering demo. We’re pretty sure there’s more Ryzen 9 CPUs to be announced very soon. Ryzen 3rd Gen CPUs would be up for sale on July 7, 2019.

Here’s a quick look at the specifications of 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs –

      Model                Cores /Threads     TDP (Watts)        Boost Clock /Base Clock (GHz)        Total Cache (MB)

Ryzen 9 3900X               12/24                    105                                    4.6/3.8                                                        70

Ryzen 7 3800X                8/16                     105                                    4.5/3.9                                                        36

Ryzen 7 3700X                8/16                      65                                     4.4/3.6                                                        36

Ryzen 5 3600X                6/12                      95                                     4.4/3.8                                                        35

Ryzen 5 3600                  6/12                      65                                     4.2/3.6                                                        35

Apart from all of the above, AMD also introduced their new X570 motherboard chipset for AM4 socket, the first chipset to support PCIe 4.0. PCIe 4.0 has double the bandwidth as that of PCIe 3.0 and provides a 42% faster storage performance. Speaking of which, all Navi GPUs and 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs will come with GDDR6 and PCIe 4.0 support.

Fans’ reaction to AMD’s keynote at Computex 2019 has been very positive. The company will provide us with more details during E3 which is just around the corner and their products will hit the shelf really soon. Right now, all we can do is eagerly wait for further information and wait till we get our hands on these amazing hardware products.

You can watch the AMD keynote at Computex 2019 here –