Early this morning (at like 4am AEDST), tech giant AMD held their very first keynote at CES, which detailed the future of AMD and what they have planned for 2019. It’s here that people were hoping to get a glimpse at AMD’s Ryzen 3 CPU line (featuring the highly anticipated Zen 2 architecture) and the Radeon Vega 7nm GPU line. But these aren’t the only things that AMD would have cooking, and so after Ben Gary Shapiro said some words and some promotional material was played AMD’s President and CEO Dr Lisa Su came onto the stage to shed light on what AMD has in store for us. So here we go:
- 2nd generation of Ryzen Mobile, now featuring AMD’s Zen+ architecture
- Up to 14% faster in quick webpage loading
- Up to 27% in video editing
- Discrete GPU software will now be available for Ryzen mobile (huzzah for Radeon Chill)
- Will be available this quarter through these OEMs (original equipment manufacturer): Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Huawei, Lenovo and Samsung
- Various OEMs will be releasing Chromebooks using AMD hardware
- Up to 15% more game performance
- 23 new or enhanced features
- 93% reliability score/industry-best stability
- One touch GPU auto-overclocking
- In-game instant replay
- Streaming to your phones, tablets and VR headsets
- The world’s first 7nm gaming GPU
- 2nd generation Vega graphics core
- 60 compute units running up to 1.8GHz
- 25% more performance at the same power
- 16GB HBM (high bandwidth memory)
- 1TB/sec memory bandwidth
- Up to 29% improvement in content creation workloads (up to 62% in OpenCL-based workloads)
- Gaming improvements (compared to 1st gen Vega):
- 35% increase in BFV (DX12 example)
- 25% increase in Fortnite (Esports example)
- 42% Strange Brigade (Vulkan example)
- Features Asynchronous compute (good for DX12), rapid pack math and shader intrinsics
- Shown playing Devil May Cry 5 at 4K with an average framerate of what seems to be around 75fps
- Can easily compete with the RTX 2080 in a lot of games (demolishes it in Vulkan though)
- Renders The Division 2 at 4K max settings very smoothly
- Get a free copy of The Division 2 with any purchase of the Radeon VII or a 2nd generation Ryzen 5 or 7
- Only need a wifi connection and a Chrome browser to stream Google’s AMD powered cloud servers at 1080p 60fps (RIP us Australians)
- Project Stream is powered by AMD Radeon Pro GPUs
- Uses the new Zen 2 core in a 7nm lithography
- 2X performance per socket vs previous gen
- 4X floating point performance vs previous gen
- Socket compatible with existing Epyc infrastructure
- 7nm Epyc performance sits far above the generational performance trendline
- Completes a NAMD render/calculation around 6.33 seconds faster than TWO Intel Xeon 8180 CPUs in the given example, up to 15% faster
- Will ship in the middle of 2019
- Powered by the Zen 2 using a 7nm lithography
- When paired with a Radeon VII, can run Forza Horizon 4 at 1080p max settings well over 100fps
- The 8-core 16-thread 3rd generation Ryzen CPU scored 17 points higher than the stock Intel 9900K in Cinebench R15, whilst using around 25% less power (mind you the clock speeds for the Ryzen chip are not final)
- The CPU die is insanely small, the rumoured 16 core Ryzen CPU may not be as unreasonable as once thought
- The very first PC platform to support the brand new, ultra-fast PCIE 4.0 standard
- Still uses AM4 chipset, so people with Ryzen setups already will just have to update their bios on their motherboard and just change the CPU
- Will launch in the middle of 2019
If you want to watch the keynote yourself, click here.
Jordan lives and breathes Dark Souls, even though his favourite game is Bloodborne. He takes pride in bashing his face on walls and praising the sun. Hailing from the land of tacos, he is the token minority for WellPlayed.
