The May version of AMD's investor presentation unexpectedly received significant changes. The company's near-to-mid-term roadmap sections of this white paper have been updated with details about the next generations of Zen 3 and Zen 4 processor architectures in preparation, details about upcoming Milan server processors, and details about the forthcoming implementation of the Navi graphics architecture in applications related to cloud gaming. At the same time, the company removed from its plans any mention of the further development of the HEDT platform and the Ryzen Threadripper lineup.
Traditionally, the most interesting in AMD's official plans, which the company regularly publishes on its website, is the slide dedicated to the announcements of client processors scheduled for the near future. In the previous version of their plans, which was In early March, before the end of this year, AMD promised to release the second generation of Ryzen Pro Mobile processors, the third generation of Ryzen desktop processors, and the third generation of Ryzen Threadripper. Now, as follows from the new version of this slide, plans have changed. Second generation Ryzen Pro Mobile processors have achieved the status of a released product - their announcement is valid in early April, and the third generation Ryzen Threadripper is no longer among the new products scheduled for release in 2019.
Thus, the only remaining major processor announcement that AMD is going to make during this year is the release of the third generation of Ryzen, built on the 7nm process technology and the Zen 2 architecture. The company continues to indicate the middle of the year as the expected date for this event. AMD is further bolstering its belief in the competitiveness of its product offerings by committing to increase shipments of Ryzen desktops and laptops by 2019% and 30%, respectively, by the end of 50.
What is the reason for the company's refusal to release new Ryzen Threadripper this year is not completely clear. The processors of this family are variants of server EPYCs adapted for the HEDT platform, while AMD expects to release Rome processors based on the Zen 2 architecture during the third quarter of this year - there have been no changes. Thus, one can only hope that the change in plans for Threadripper is not a complete collapse of this family, and the third generation of AMD HEDT processors will still see the light later, for example, in 2020.
Speaking about its more distant plans, AMD added information about the development of future processor architectures to the presentation. It is reported that the preparation of Zen 3 processors, which will be used in the production of an improved version of the 7nm process technology (7+ nm), is proceeding according to plan, and in addition, the company's engineers are currently working on the next generation of the Zen 4 architecture.
Zen 3 and Zen 4-based consumer processors have not been released yet, but the server section of the presentation claims that Zen 3-based EPYC Milan generations will see the light of day in 2020.
As for AMD's plans for GPUs, there are no significant changes here. The company plans to introduce a 7nm Navi architecture this year, and in 2020 it will be replaced by an unnamed next-generation architecture, based on which GPUs will use 7+ nm manufacturing technology.
True, it should be noted that an additional slide appeared in the presentation on the use of AMD GPUs in data centers. In addition to the accelerators Radeon Instinct MI25, MI50 and MI60 known to us, it also mentions a promising accelerator based on the 7nm GPU Navi, which is scheduled for release in the third quarter of this year, and cloud gaming services are indicated as a target segment for this solution.
From this we can conclude that AMD is going to start offering hardware platforms for services like Google Stadia and Microsoft Project xCloud to partners in the very near future.
Source: 3dnews.ru