News What Will AMD Reveal at CES 2020?

Mileta Cekovic

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Jun 3, 2013
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If what rumors we are hearing about what the Intel 10th gen desktop "improvements" will offer, I think you are probably right. AMD keeps pushing the envelope, while Intel seems satisfied with the incremental tiny steps.
Well, Intels 10th gen will mostly close the gap to Ryzen 3000 in multithreading. And given that clock-for-clock Intel and AMD are now trading blows (AMD better in productivity by few percents and Intel in memory intensive apps - i.e. games), parity on number of cores/threads will actually close the gap and it will be just up to pricing who will do better overall. Only advantage Zen2 will have is in number of cores in the very high end Ryzen 9's 12 and 16 cores vs Intel's Core i9 10 cores). But in mid-range, Ryzen 5/7 vs Core i5/i7 would be equal. If Intel can match AMD in price then it would be the draw...
 
If what rumors we are hearing about what the Intel 10th gen desktop "improvements" will offer, I think you are probably right.
Actually, if the rumored specifications are accurate, Intel's 10th-gen processors should definitely heat up competition. By adding/restoring SMT across the lineup, they're once again increasing thread counts at any given price point much like they did with their initial Coffee Lake release in response to Ryzen. The new i3s should perform like Coffee Lake i5s, the i5s should perform like i7s, and the i7s should perform like i9s. It's effectively like they're cutting the prices of their processors by $100 or so.

While AMD's current lineup is strong against Intel, that primarily comes down to them offering higher thread counts at each price point, something Intel's new lineup appears to address. With AMD and Intel offering the same number of cores and threads at similar price points, it will come down to performance per core. AMD offers very competitive IPC now, but Intel can clock their chips higher, so I suspect Intel's new offerings should have a slight performance advantage over AMD's current processors at most tasks. AMD should be pretty close, but if they want to maintain momentum, they'll need to lower prices. They have their next-generation Zen 3 processors coming eventually, which may turn the tides, but Intel's new CPUs are rumored to be coming within the next couple months, while Zen 3 desktop chips won't likely launch until at least half a year later.

I wouldn't say that AMD is "worried" about Intel's processor lineup for this year, but they will undoubtedly need to adjust prices in response to it.
 
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Gillerer

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Haven't AMD stated that they're aiming for a 12 - 18 month cadence between CPU generations? From the 7/2019 Zen 2 release it could be anywhere within 7/2020 to 1/2021 - with six of the seven months falling into H2/2020.

Now "release" and mass public availability may be different things again... Having said that, AMD may have learned their lesson from the last time, and prepare by ordering and stockpiling enough silicon to meet at least a sizable portion of the demand.

But I think the most likely announcement would be Zen 2 based APUs, and those could be coming sooner - mid H1/2020, maybe?
 
And of course, new graphics cards, which were not actually mentioned in the article. The RX 5600 XT will most likely be announced, as it is rumored to be coming this month, and I wouldn't be surprised if we hear about a new enthusiast-level card from them, as the existence of "big Navi" has been rumored for a while, and it's been a year since they announced the Radeon VII. A 300 watt Navi card with performance in the 2080 SUPER to 2080 Ti range seems plausible. Maybe with hardware raytracing?